Picking the wrong size ice machine is the most common mistake we see, and it almost always goes the same direction: too small. The machine looks fine on a Tuesday in February, then the first hot Saturday in May the bin is empty by 7 p.m. and someone is driving to the store for bagged ice.
The good news is that sizing isn’t complicated. You need two numbers: how much ice you use per customer, and how many customers you serve on a busy day.
Start with these rough estimates
Hoshizaki publishes rule-of-thumb numbers for how much ice different kinds of businesses use in a day. They’re a solid starting point:
- Restaurants: about 2 pounds per customer
- Bars and cocktail lounges: about 3 pounds per seat
- School and university cafeterias: about 1.5 pounds per student
- Hospitals: about 1 pound per person in the cafeteria, plus about 10 pounds per bed
- Salad bars: about 35 pounds per cubic foot of display
- Water service: about 45 pounds per 100 glasses
Do the math with your busiest day
Say you run a restaurant that serves 250 people on a Saturday. That’s 250 × 2 = 500 pounds of ice. Add a 12-seat bar and you’re looking at another 36 pounds, so call it about 540 pounds a day.
Always size for your busiest day, not your average one. Your slow days take care of themselves.
Then add a cushion
Ice machine production ratings are measured under ideal conditions. In a hot kitchen or a back room without good airflow, an air-cooled machine makes noticeably less ice than the number on the spec sheet. In Jacksonville, that’s most of the year.
So we tell almost everyone to go up a size. In the example above, we’d look at a machine in the 600 to 650 pound range rather than one rated right at 540. If the machine makes more ice than you need, it fills the bin and shuts itself off. There’s no real downside. If it makes less than you need, you find out at the worst possible moment.
Don’t forget the bin
The machine makes ice. The bin stores it. A machine might produce 600 pounds over 24 hours, but if your rush happens between 6 and 9 p.m., what matters is how much ice is sitting in the bin when the rush starts. If you have one heavy service period a day, a larger bin can matter as much as a larger machine.
Match the ice to the job
- Crescent cubes are the workhorse for restaurants and fountain drinks. They displace liquid well and don’t stick together in the bin.
- Cubelet (nugget) ice is the soft, chewable ice people love. It’s popular in healthcare, quick-service and anywhere customers fill their own cups.
- Ice dispensers make sense in hotels, offices and healthcare facilities where people serve themselves and you want to keep hands out of the bin.
Or let us do it
We size machines every day, and we’d rather spend five minutes on the phone than install the wrong one. Tell us what kind of business you run and how many people you serve on a busy day, and we’ll recommend the right Hoshizaki machine and give you a monthly lease price. Call (904) 620-9813 or send us a message. You can also browse every machine we lease by size.
