Refurbished Commercial Dishwashers

The cycle. A commercial machine washes in a short cycle with a dosed detergent and finishes with a fresh hot rinse, so a rack comes out ready to use in minutes rather than in an hour. It is built around throughput, not around a quiet overnight wash.

Then the construction. Stainless body and tank, a wash pump sized for continuous use, and components meant to be serviced rather than replaced as a unit. That is also why a used commercial machine is a reasonable buy and a used domestic machine in a cafe is not.

Undercounter for a cafe, a bar or a small kitchen: fits under a bench, handles glassware and plates, and needs the least space. Passthrough for a kitchen with real volume: a rack slides in under a hood, the hood comes down, and it sits above an undercounter machine in throughput.

Conveyor for institutional volume, where racks move through continuously. Most sites that outgrow an undercounter machine go to a passthrough rather than straight to a conveyor, because the conveyor needs space and services an ordinary kitchen does not have.

Behind a bar, usually yes. A glasswasher runs a gentler cycle suited to glass and sits where the glasses are used, which keeps bar glassware out of the kitchen machine where it gets chipped and comes back greasy.

In a small cafe, one undercounter machine doing both is normal and works, provided it is loaded sensibly. The test is whether glassware volume is high enough to compete with plates at the same time. If the bar and the kitchen peak together, buy two machines.

Hot or cold water in depending on the model, a drain out, and the electrical supply the product page specifies. Some machines are three phase and some need a 15 amp outlet, which takes a wider earth pin and will not accept a standard plug until an electrician fits one.

You also need somewhere for the detergent and rinse aid containers to sit, with the dosing lines reaching them. Plan the plumbing, waste and chemical storage into the bench run, because retrofitting a drain to a finished kitchen is the expensive version.

A great deal, and it shows up twice: as scale in the machine's boiler and elements, and as spotting and film on the glassware. Hard water is the usual reason glasses come out cloudy when the machine and the chemicals are both fine.

Water treatment is standard practice rather than an extra. Find out about the water where the machine is going and plan for treatment and for descaling as a routine. On a used machine, ask about the water where it last worked and whether it ran behind treatment.

The tank and the boiler for scale and corrosion, the wash and rinse pumps, the door or hood mechanism and its seals, and the wash arms and jets for blockages. Then the dosing pumps for detergent and rinse aid, which are small, cheap and commonly worn.

Ask us what was replaced during the refurbishment rather than what was tested, and check the brand still has service agents in Australia. A dishwasher down is a kitchen washing by hand, so parts availability is worth more here than a slightly better price.

Yes, and it is the part most often left out of the budget. A dishwasher needs a dirty side to stack and scrape on, ideally with a sink and a spray, and a clean side to land the hot rack on. Without both, the machine becomes the bottleneck no matter how fast it washes. Refurbished dishwasher benches are built for exactly this.

Allow for racks as well, since a machine running continuously needs more racks than it has slots, and for a dishwasher sink on the dirty side. Plan the whole run as one piece of bench rather than buying the machine and working out the rest later.

Often yes. Silverchef Rent-Try-Buy lets you rent the machine instead of buying it outright, so the cash stays in the rest of the fit-out and the payments are an operating expense.

It also helps where the throughput is a guess. Undersizing the dishwasher is one of the most common fit-out mistakes, and it is felt at the end of every shift. Being able to step up from an undercounter to a passthrough machine without writing off the first one is worth something. Ask us which units in stock can go on a rental.