Best Commercial Ice Maker

Hi I’m Lester with Ice & Refrigeration Systems, and today we’re going to be talking about different types of ice and ice makers. There are two basic different types of ice makers, and they make ice in a completely different way. We’re going to talk about the features and benefits of both of those. One is a flaker ice machine. Flaker ice machines make two types of ice. They make flaked or snowflake type of ice that looks like a snowflake – it’s just a shaved piece of flaked ice. The other type of ice style machine of ice flaker type is a nugget ice, a soft, chewable nugget that you find at Chick-Fil-A, Chicken Express, Braum’s, Sonic drive ins. It’s very popular right now. People love soft chewable ice. So let’s take a look at a flaker ice machine. We’ll walk through so you can see how this makes ice, the advantages to it. Flaker and nugget ice machines cost more than cubers. The initial up front cost of that is higher. You can take a smaller ice machine and get a higher production value out of it in a pound per ice type of situation on a flaker and nugget machine than you can a cuber because the way it makes ice, there’s not the downtime of the machine going into harvest. So when this machine is on, it’s always making ice. Here’s basically how it makes ice. This is the drum, inside the drum, is a stainless steel core and the water pours down the core and that core is what’s freezing cold and ice forms up on the core. In the middle of the core is a screw augur that continually goes around and around and as the ice touches the screw auger, it shaves it off the sides of the stainless steel drum. It will drive it up here and then it will drop it down this chute into the bin. So water comes down. There’s a gear housing down here, and a gear housing up here and those hold the augur in and they spin the augur around and around and the flaked ice will come up and then fall down into the bin.