Small Business Ice Machine

My wife and daughter have a small cafe.  When purchased the ice machine worked.  After cleaning it stopped working.  Ice machines are actually pretty simple.  Water runs over a chilled panel in the 'F' (freeze) mode.  Once the ice is of a certain thickness you move into 'H' (harvest) mode and the ice is released into a hopper and on and on.  That first ice machine had a couple of adjustments.  As I recall it was 1)thickness of the ice and 2) F time.  For two days I fiddled with the adjustments, knowing that the control panel had been replaced since it did not match the wiring diagram.  Finally I looked closer and realized the two controls were reversed; everything I did for two days was opposite of what the indicators said.

That machine was replaced with a new Scotsman Ice Machine.  Scotsman once had 75% of the world market of ice machines and happened to be from my home town.  It's corporate legacy was the American Gas Machine company which became large from a natural gas regulator for space heaters that began to appear after WWII as homes switched from coal and fuel oil to natural gas.  They also created what was to become widely know, the Coleman Stove and Coleman Lantern.   AGM was purchased by Coleman and then I think they were purchased by King Seely Thermos.  AGM was owned by my cousin's husbands grandfather, one of those 'who cares?' facts.

My daughter cleaned the ice machine FRI afternoon.  Living closer, I checked to see if it was producing ice this morning.  There was an error code and to make a long story short there have been three trips and four or five disassembly and re-assembly cycles.  For a while it errored out when I put the cover back on...which of course covered the error code panel.  In the IT world my help desk staff would always go to the first question "have you re-booted your computer."  At this moment that seems odd that anyone would know what 're-boot' means.  Looking up bootstrap would be a good start.  Sometimes you'd have to do a warm boot (software only), other times a hard boot (power off).  The hard boot would clean out most of the cooties.  I try to do a hard boot every night for about seven hours.  Finally I pulled the plug on the ice machine and started over.  There have been five successful 'harvests' of ice.  Once more should be occurring in six minutes.  At that point I'm headed off for other labor on my Labor Day weekend.

In retrospect much of this falls into the 'who cares?' category.

Sunday Update

As of 9 AM everything was great with lots of ice.  As of 6 PM it errorred out again.  Now it's time for an expert.