Most of us will have indulged in fast food on a long motorway drive. Restaurants at services receive a large quantity of customers – especially on weekends. One Sunday morning, a popular southern fried chicken restaurant at a services near Reading suffered a ventilation fan failure that stopped cooking completely. Luckily, Rotamec was available to quickly solve the problem.The profitability of a fast food restaurant is directly tied to footfall. Many establishments operate almost around the clock. This is especially true at services, where motorists at different times of the day and night will visit restaurants to recharge during journeys. Turning away hungry customers doesn’t just result in lost profit, but also a loss of reputation. If downtime occurs on a busy weekend, the problem is magnified, as responsive support may not be available to solve maintenance issues.
Responsive maintenance support around the clock is a specialty of Rotamec, as Andy Newman, Operations Director explains: “We offer a full range of electromechanical maintenance services to customers 24 hours a day. For this particular job, we were notified at 8am that the restaurant had suffered a ventilation fan failure that had stopped all cooking. The ventilation fan was interlocked with the gas supply system, so the fan failure had cut supply to the cookers. Without a fix, the restaurant would be unable to serve customers.”
Retained maintenance staff at the restaurant had first noticed the issue at 10pm on Saturday. After trying and failing to fix the problem, which was assumed to involve the fan’s variable speed drive, they turned to Rotamec early the next morning.
“After the call we were on-site within three to four hours,” Andy says, “We inspected the ventilation fan and the VSD, the latter of which was displaying an error code. This identified that there was a short circuit in the 2.2 kW fan motor, which would need to be replaced.”
Rotamec contacted the supplier to source a spare fan unit including a new motor. It was ascertained that sourcing a complete extraction unit for reinstallation was the best approach to minimise repair time. Once delivered to site, Rotamec then installed the new unit and reprogrammed the VSD to suit. When the fan was again operational, the cookers were turned back on and normal service could resume.
“Downtime at the restaurant was causing losses of thousands of pounds per hour – so a fast reaction was of the utmost importance for this repair. By getting to site quickly, identifying the problem and carrying out the most optimised maintenance methodology available to us, we were able to minimise losses as much as possible. Plus, anyone wanting a chicken burger on the way home wasn’t disappointed!”
