A restaurant back room with a modular ice machine on its bin and navy painted cabinets, seen close at the ice machine's bin door.

San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Area

Ice machine repair in Russian Hill.

The Atkinson House on the Vallejo Street Crest, built in 1853, is among the oldest houses still standing in San Francisco.

(844) 410-9163

Mon–Sat, 8am–8pm

San Francisco
Three things about Russian Hill
10 repairs we do here

Book a visit

Three short steps, about a minute.

or call (844) 410-9163

What Russian Hill does
to an ice machine.

Lombard Street's switchback block between Hyde and Leavenworth, built in 1922 to tame a 27 percent grade, draws so many visitors that this corner of the hill is often crowded.

Visitors also ride the cable car along Hyde Street, which is lined with restaurants and shops.

NOAA's normals for downtown San Francisco count about 18 days a year at 80°F or warmer, roughly half of them in September and October.

All of San Francisco Bay Area

Tower living

Building rules usually send an ice machine's drain to a floor sink or a standpipe through a long run of pipe, so a slow drain in a tower is found by following that line and its air gap, not by pulling the machine out of its opening.

Small cafes and back bars

Behind a narrow bar the undercounter ice machine is boxed in by coolers and a sink, and an air-cooled unit forced to breathe its own warm exhaust runs long cycles and drops thin cubes, so the clearance at its front grille is checked before the sealed system.

Older housing stock

Older wiring may put an ice machine's compressor on a circuit shared with other bar equipment, and a breaker that trips each time the harvest starts is left off and reported rather than reset again and again; at a burning smell, switch the breaker off.

A visit in
Russian Hill.

Four steps from the call to a working ice machine in Russian Hill, San Francisco.

What repairs cost

01One cycle, watched closely
02The cause, then the price
03Parts that travel with us
04A harvest before we go

When an ice machine
cannot wait in Russian Hill.

In Russian Hill as anywhere, these four call for the ice machine to be shut down and left that way for our visit: water spreading from it or its drain across a walkway or toward an outlet, a burning or hot electrical smell, a breaker that trips when it starts, or a hiss or gas smell at a machine charged with flammable R-290.

All 17 problems