Cafe equipment: servicing before it fails

A cafe runs on four or five machines. When one stops, the room keeps filling and the queue does not care why.

Equipment fails hardest on your busiest day, because that is the day it works hardest. Servicing exists to move that moment somewhere cheaper.

List what you own and what each one needs

Most cafes cannot say when the grinder was last serviced. Your list needs the machine, its age, its service interval and the last date somebody touched it.

Hold that as records rather than as paper in a drawer. A due date on each machine turns servicing into a filter you read monthly.

Daily care does more than any service contract

Most equipment failures start as maintenance nobody did. A backflush skipped for a fortnight becomes a repair bill.

Your closing checklist carries the daily items, with names against them. Our guide to opening and closing checks covers writing those so they cannot pass vaguely.

Book services into your quiet weeks

A technician arriving at eight on a Saturday costs you the morning. The same visit on a Tuesday in February costs you very little.

The year's services get booked when the year gets set, around your own trade. A machine serviced two weeks early beats one serviced during a rush.

Know what happens when the machine stops

Every cafe should be able to answer three questions before the morning it matters.

1. Who do we ring, and what is their actual response time?
2. What do we run in the meantime, whether that is a second grinder, batch brew or filter?
3. What do we tell customers, so the queue hears one answer rather than five?

Ten minutes of planning turns a disaster into an inconvenience. Your team then has something to do rather than a decision to make.

Water matters more than most owners think

Scale kills machines slowly and expensively, and filters expire quietly. A filter change is cheap and a boiler is not.

The filter change belongs on the same list as everything else, with its own date. It is the highest return maintenance in most cafes.

Replace on evidence, not on frustration

Each breakdown records its date, its cost and the trade it lost. A machine with three failures in a year is making the argument for you.

Without that record, replacement happens after the worst Saturday rather than at the right time. The record turns a reaction into a plan.

Hold the spare parts that stop a morning

A group head gasket costs very little and its failure costs a morning. The same is true of a grinder burr and a few common fittings.

A technician can name which parts fail most on your machines, and those belong on the shelf. The list is usually shorter than anybody expects.

The team needs to know they exist. A spare nobody remembers is the same as no spare, on the morning the machine stops. A spare in a cupboard nobody remembers is the same as no spare at all.

Your technician will usually fit the spares you hold at a lower call out cost, because the visit gets shorter. That alone often pays for holding them.

A machine that never stops is cheaper than any repair you negotiate well.

What to change first

• Every machine carries its age, interval and last service date
• The daily care items sit on the closing checklist, with names
• The year's services book into your own quiet weeks
• The three breakdown questions get answered before anybody needs them
• The water filter is a dated item like any other
• Every breakdown records its cost and the trade it lost