My walk-in died at 4:45pm on a Friday with 60 covers on the books

The compressor on our old walk-in finally gave out last Friday around 4:45pm, right as we were prepping for a 60 cover dinner rush. I walked into the back and it was already 58 degrees inside, which meant everything in there was about to be a problem. I grabbed every cooler we had, stuffed what I could into the reach-ins, and put the rest on ice in sheet pans while my line cook called around for a repair guy. Nobody could come until Saturday morning, so we ran the whole service out of two reach-ins and a chest freezer I borrowed from the bar next door. We only had to 86 the scallops and the creme brulee, which honestly felt like a win. Has anyone here dealt with a compressor dying mid-service, and did you end up replacing the whole unit or just the part?

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jamiegreen5h ago

Oh man, that 4:45 timing is brutal, right in the middle of the setup chaos. I once had a compressor go out on a Saturday morning and I thought that was bad, so mid-service on a Friday sounds like my personal nightmare. My old unit was on its last legs anyway, so I just bit the bullet and swapped the whole thing since the new compressor plus labor was almost half the price of a fresh box. If yours is ancient like mine was, I'd get a quote on both before you decide, because throwing a new part into a dying unit can bite you again in six months.

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