Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In spite of this being Amazon's choice for 'Commercial Ice Maker' this is not even close to being a commercial ice maker. I bought this as a replacement for a REAL commercial ice maker that had served great ice for 20+ years and had high expectations. On unboxing I was suspicious of the lightweight construction of the unit and the extremely poor design for the water supply and drain connectors. I managed to get it installed and stop the leaking from the water supply connector after some fiddling. The ice production on this machine runs on a timer as opposed to a sensor - this is a big difference since you end up hoping that adding or subtracting a minute of ice making time will result in production of satisfactory ice cubes. With an ambient room temperature of 70 degrees F the normal setting was producing sheets of ice so thick that they had to be broken up with a mallet. Eventually, turning the timer down to -4 minutes, the 'bridge' between the individual cubes was thin enough to break by hand, however the ice cubes were mostly hollow, and too thin to last in a drink for more than a few minutes. Life is about compromise, so I thought that I'd live with it and end up drinking a lot more frozen margaritas and less on the rocks. But then, after a full six days of frozen margaritas, the machine died with an 'E2' message which the manual informs me is an ice making error or refrigerant leak. Six days of margaritas wasn't nearly long enough for the price paid. Amazon makes life easy and arranging the return was no problem (thankfully), but let me say that this thing weighs 72 pounds and packing this baby up and getting it to the UPS store for return to Amazon was no thrill. So, all in all, from my own experience a 1 is a generous rating on this machine. I've decided to purchase a (real) commercial ice maker like my old one, and have decided on the Scotsman CU3030MA-1 Prodigy Ice Maker. The price is high, but when you consider a good commercial machine that can last 20+ years with proper maintenance vs. a potential 6 days for a 'commercial looking' machine, the cost comes out to something like $0.35 cents a day versus $91.66 per day which is basically what I got with this unit.