Anyone have experience in the Ice Machine business?

Money is good on the repair side, if you don’t mind working for it. Once you wrap your head around the gas cycle of the machine. Now are you speaking of the drive up style ice machine houses or the conventional stand up type machines? I’m an HVACR tech have been for 7 years. Feel free to ask any questions (job related lol)

Lots of maintenance, high initial costs, lots of requirements to be on call to go fix it and give the guy his $1.50 back when it doesn’t work.

I have as well been looking into these machines and the potential for them. If I remember correctly, to franchise one of them there was some pretty excessive start-up fees and not a lot of information out there on long-term financial success. The easy button would be to work with a gas station or grocery store to see if you can "rent" part of their parking to install it, but then you would potentially be bastardizing their ice business so they may not want that. In addition to "renting" the land, you'd probably have to compensate them with part of your profits for their lost business.

Liquor Store parking lot would be a good idea as well. Whenever i've seen these type of machines, it's always been on a rural road and i've never seen someone actually getting ice.

I do. It sucked, my company had one 5-6 years ago and I managed it. This was before I started my own business but as said above the repair bill if you have to call a tech will eat you up after 2-3 years when they are out of warranty and parts start to fail. Nothing terrible, but the "commercial HVAC" guys will bend you over and frick you with no care.

Unless you own a business where the land is free and you have an employee on site to do basic things then they aren't worth it. Any good site is likely already taken or you can't get also.

Knowing what I know, my guess is most of the bigger machines in rural areas lose money and probably a lot if they are purchased with a loan. Now the smaller ones that sit out on the sidewalk of a convenience store may do well, IDK.

Now, if you own a convenience store or something they may absolutely be worth it.

The initial cost of the machines now is crazy, well over $100k for the large ones.

You have to sell on avg something like 100 bags a day for it to make sense from an ROI standpoint. Which is hard to do when you have days you dont sell any especially in the winter.

ETA: FWIW I thought it was a good idea years ago too. I was excited to take the one over for my company, it was a non profit and we did it as a means of income and the land use was free and what I assumed was a great spot. It wasn't.

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You could always move it if you sited it poorly. Sounds like a small scale self service Car Wash proposition, almost daily attention has to be paid to it.

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Moving them is by no means easy. The site has to have electrical, water, and sewer. Which is not cheap especially commercially to have installed. Then you have to move the actual machine.

Yes the machines only hold about 250 bags. I can’t remember exactly. Which sounds like a lot, but again you selling 100 bags at $1.25 is only $125/ day. So any day you are making money you have to be going through 100 bags a day, so you are adding bags a couple times a week. Not everyone uses bags, but you should be adding bags all the time or you just aren’t selling much.

Good info in this thread.. i had actually looked into the ice machine thing a few months ago myself.. Seems like a pretty much losing proposition unless you already have some great circumstances set up in place.

Are there any other businesses similar to the almost-passive ice machine thing, but with better prospects and possibly lower starting costs that maybe im not aware of ?