Commercial ovens help you get warm meals in the hands of hungry customers. Keep them up and running with our guide to troubleshooting, parts, and more.
Welcome to another 86 Repairs Guide! In this series, we provide valuable troubleshooting, preventative maintenance, and warranty information on the equipment and infrastructure found in your restaurant. We hope this information will help you and your team become more informed about repairs and maintenance (R&M)—and save you time and money along the way.
Chances are, if your restaurant serves hot food, you probably have at least one commercial oven to help you cook and get warm meals in the hands of hungry customers. But it’s only a batter of time before those ovens act up—leaving you without a heat source to prepare food at the right temperature.
If you run a bakery and your main oven won’t get to temp, you have nothing to sell for the day. Same problem for, say, a gyro shop: you would never sell raw meat in a pita to your customers who came for the succulent, slow-roasted beef and lamb sliced from a spit.
Wanna dough a secret? Preventative maintenance can stop oven issues before they happen, and troubleshooting can often avoid expensive vendor repairs. In this guide, we’ll cover both of those topics, as well as parts and warranty advice for commercial ovens.
Commercial ovens are the pieces of equipment within a kitchen with hot, enclosed chambers used to cook and bake food. Several types of ovens can be found in any given commercial kitchen, including but not limited to:
All of these ovens share the same general functionality. On a very basic level, ovens work by utilizing a heat source, like electricity or gas, to heat the bottom of the chamber. With a door enclosing the space, hot air rises to the top of the unit and causes the food inside to warm until it’s cooked through.
If one of your commercial ovens won’t work the way it should, here’s what you can expect when you call a vendor for service.
86 Repairs collects information from every single equipment and infrastructure incident that we manage for our customers. From this dataset, we’re able to offer the restaurant industry never-before-seen manufacturer and vendor data.
We classify commercial ovens as hot side equipment—or the items within a kitchen that apply heat to food. Here’s what we can share about hot side equipment performance in 2022 to date:
Interested in the average invoice costs and first-time fix rates for other common pieces of kitchen equipment? Check out The State of Repairs, our annual report on R&M. It’s the only resource available for restaurant operators to benchmark their R&M expenses.
If they aren’t cared for properly, commercial ovens can really burn through an R&M budget. But preventative maintenance tactics can help prolong the life of these essential pieces of equipment.
Thinking about setting a preventative maintenance schedule for your restaurant? You’re already a legend in the baking. 😉 Here’s what you should include to keep ovens working at their full potential.
Keep your chamber crumb-free to avoid smoky scents from the unit:
If you aren’t using your ovens that often, clean the interior and remove debris monthly. For commercial ovens that are used heavily day in and day out, we suggest cleaning every week.
Ensure your ovens are correctly temping to get the best bakes possible. Oven calibration is usually done by a technician, but if you want to give it a go in-house:
Commercial ovens can’t get to temp if the burners and pilot light aren’t working properly. Every six months, make sure they’re operating as they should:
Steam ovens rely on boiling water to heat their interiors. The boiler within a steam oven has water filters that need to be changed every 4 to 6 months.
Don’t ignore this crucial step. If you don’t swap the water filters, the unit will get hard water buildup—which will destroy the machine from the inside out and invalidate any manufacturer warranties!
Even the best-laid preventative maintenance plans can’t stop every single commercial oven issue. When your oven starts acting up, use these troubleshooting tips to try and resolve the issue before spending time and money on vendor dispatch.
Pretty hard to bake when an oven won’t get hot, huh? The main culprit of this symptom is the pilot light. To see if your flame is still burning, look for a metal kick plate below the oven door. Lift it and flip outwards to reveal the burners as well as the pilot light.
If the pilot is out,
It’s a big problem. But before you call your local utility company,
Commercial ovens that won’t get as hot as they should are just as concerning as ovens that won’t work at all. Cooking is an act of chemistry: if you don’t have the right balance of ingredients and the type of heat applied to them, your recipes won’t turn out the way they should.
Combi ovens are pretty smart. They not only use multiple heating methods, but they also have smart systems that will pinpoint an issue as soon as it arises.
If your combi oven is giving you an error code, check it on the manufacturer's website or within your user manual. The error could be anything from a cleaning cycle reminder to an alert that the unit has no gas.
If troubleshooting your commercial ovens doesn’t do the trick, consider our parts and warranty advice before you accidentally spend more than you need to on repair.
Several commercial oven parts are very easy to procure and replace in-house. Everything from burner tubes, oven knobs, interior grates, and water filters (for steam ovens) can easily be purchased online or in store and replaced by you or someone else on your team. Just double-check part specifications before you go shopping!
As with most new restaurants, your commercial ovens should be covered by the equipment manufacturer if there’s a failure in the equipment within the first year it’s in service. Before you call a vendor for oven repair, double-check with your manufacturer to see what may apply.
Combi ovens, however, are a special case. Almost all of the combi oven manufacturers train and certify technicians themselves since the equipment is so specialized. For combi oven issues, call your manufacturer before you call a vendor—if you use a specialist that hasn’t been certified by the manufacturer, your warranty could be invalidated and the technician may have difficulties getting their hands on parts.
It’s a half-baked idea to ignore preventative maintenance on your commercial ovens—and just as foolish to ignore simple troubleshooting steps that can save your business hundreds of dollars on a visit from a vendor.
We hope these tips will keep you cooking without applying too much heat to your R&M budget.
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