Best Practices to help protect your Espresso machine and Coffee equipment when dealing with utility outages and freezing temperatures.

⚡Power Outage: 
Turn your machines off at the power switch if you lose power or plan to lose power.  Once you get stable power back turn them on. This helps prevent power surges from hitting sensitive electronics. 

🚱Water outage:
Turn off your equipment. (Turning off water supply to the equipment is also recommended). Once water is back run nearby sinks to make sure it's clear and not full of air or debris. If it is, continue to flush it until clear. Turn water and power on to equipment.

❄️Freezing temps:
This one gets more difficult. You don't want the espresso machines or brewers (or anything with water) to freeze. While draining the boilers can help reduce damage it's impossible to get all the water out and you will still get damaged gauges, valves and tubes. So keeping them from freezing is really the only way to avoid damage. There's a ton of creative ways to do this but it all boils down to keeping the temp above 32 degrees. 

If you are not expecting power or water outages you can do this by keeping the equipment powered up. If you do have outages, portable heaters, heated blankets, blankets and boxes to create a well insulated environment around the machine and even temporary "hot hands" heating packs could all work to keep the temp of the machine above freezing. It's a simple problem of keeping it above 32 degrees that has many different ways to solve depending on the specifics. If it's a serious freeze and you don't see a good way to address it then uninstalling the machine and transporting it to a heated location might actually be the best option.

Due to the damage freezing causes, we require machines to come into the shop for repairs. The reason for this is because often times there are multiple issues and leaks that can't be caught until the large leak is fixed, so longer term testing and monitoring is the only way to avoid multiple visits. In addition freezing breaks parts that usually don't go bad in normal operation so we don't always stock those low use fittings, tubes and boilers. Give us a call and we can schedule a pickup or shop drop off to get your machine diagnosed and on it's way to repair. 

For more talk about frozen machines and some of what gets damaged check out the discussion with Marty Roe.
https://youtu.be/Sz6uT_uCeZg?si=yolXVKLzm6su8pk5