Maintaining Your Restaurant’s Electrical Equipment

Without your restaurant's electrical equipment, your business cannot perform important functions like cooking, providing entertainment, or POS operations, which is why it is so important to include equipment maintenance as part of your regular business routine.

Failure to maintain your electrical equipment leads to break-downs and malfunctions which can affect your food and liquor costs, business transactions, and overall business performance and profitability. Before writing-off maintenance checks due to a lack of time or procrastination, consider the financial damage your restaurant could sustain when you are unable to serve food, track sales, or have to throw away hundreds of dollars worth of spoiled perishable items.

While regular maintenance checks may seem like a minor thing on your list of important operational tasks, failure to follow through with them could spell disaster for you and your business. Broken or damaged electrical equipment could cause such situations as:

• Cooler, refrigerator and freezer breakdown which can cause hundreds of dollars worth of food to spoil. Not only does this raise your food costs and monthly losses, but it lowers your ability to make sales and meet customer demand.
• Ovens, grills, of fryers break down preventing your kitchen from completing food orders, causing you to lose sales while creating a negative impression for your customers.
• Your POS system goes down possibly locking-up your cash registers and preventing an ability to process credit card sales, which inhibits customer service and sales as well as your ability to track reports.
• Your entertainment system breaks down preventing customers from dancing, listening to music, or watching sporting events on television. For clubs that rely on entertainment as a means to attract patrons, this not only creates a negative impression, but it can drive your customers to seek a good time somewhere else.

It is relatively easy to maintain your restaurant's electrical equipment:

• Keep all of the owner's manuals accessible. Most manuals come complete with troubleshooting guides, storage and electrical capacity instructions, and numbers or web addresses for the manufacturer in case of malfunction. In addition to these helpful tips, many manuals have maintenance schedules and guidelines.
• Make sure that your restaurant is adequately wired for your equipment. Overloading circuits can short-out your equipment, resulting in severe damage or fires.
• Perform regularly scheduled maintenance including checking electrical output, cleaning and replacing any temporary components like filters, belts, or coolant.
• Keep your equipment clean inside and out. At least once a week clean underneath and behind large pieces of equipment. If your POS system uses a touch-screen, keep the screen clean and your printers free from dust and debris.

Equipment maintenance is just as important for your restaurant as it is for any other industry. Do not put it on the back burner or wait to take care of it later. By the time "later" comes around you may have already lost hundreds of dollars in ruined stock or customer sales.

If you constantly run into equipment problems, your restaurant gains the reputation as a place where customers can expect inconsistent service and food as well as an overall unsatisfactory experience. Don't make the mistake of thinking that electrical problems will go away on their own.

As a restaurant owner, you must be ready to accept the responsibility of maintaining your equipment if you want to own a prosperous, growing business.

Have you had any recent experiences (either positive or negative) with maintaining your restaurant's equipment?