We had two serving lines replaced in July 2015 with Delfield modules. One of the modules, a heated serving counter with five heated food warmers (hot wells), came with (against my better judgement) low wattage heat pads. The salesman convinced my boss that these were the best things since sliced bread. Of course, all my other hot wells have conventional calrod heating elements. Anyway, one of the wells wasn't heating. It turns out the element is "open". For some reason, these elements don't have a limit. I called Welbilt Kitchen Care and, sure enough, the whole well needs to be replaced. Heritage has them for $862. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come because there are 9 more of them between the two serving lines and they all have built in drains. Ugh!
Here's what they look like:
With your chrome heart shining in the sun, long may you run.
Just to follow up on this heated serving counter hot well situation. I finally had a chance to pull the defective hot well. The photos should be self-explanatory, except they don't show what's involved in disassembling the thing to get to the hot wells. You can see why the defective one wasn't working and you can see the hot wells adjacent to the defective hot well that are still working, but not for long based on their poor condition. The heating pads are deteriorating badly and they're less than 4-years-old. If Delfield (Welbilt) has their way, I'll be changing out hot wells every 4 years for the next 16 years. To get to this point, it has taken me four hours. For what it's worth, I can change out a calrod hot well and infinite control in less than two hours.
Hot wells after all glass sneeze guards, lights and heat lamps removed. You can see some of the sneeze guard brackets.
Hot wells removed from base. Notice how I had to cut out the drain
Defective hot well
Adjacent (still working) hot well
Adjacent (still working) hot well
Here's what the serving line looked like after it was installed.
Last edited by SandShark; 07-03-2019 at 05:07 PM.
With your chrome heart shining in the sun, long may you run.
That’s a serious design flaw if you ask me. Those wells look great. No rust or pitting or any deterioration at all. To say that the customer is saving money on the electric with the blanket style heater might be true. But if they only last a few years any savings will surely be eaten up by the labor to replace the wells every four years.
How very typical of a manufacturer these days. They redesign something only for it to be harder to work on and more costly to the end user in the long run.
The school district should look for another sales rep. He shares the blame with selling them this junk.
Though I’m not a big fan of the guy, I don’t think he had any way of knowing that these wells were going to have issues. I’m sure he saw them on display at an equipment expo and drank the kool-aid Delfield was serving. I know if I have a say in choosing equipment, the first thing I, as a technician, want to know is how serviceable the equipment is going to be. Salespeople don’t think that way.
I've hated Delfield for years. But Continental is coming up fast from the year. We have a multi-million dollar kitchen at our campus that just sat unused. They decided to hire a chef to cook lunch for all the higher monkey-monks that are there every day. Not even open yet and a drawer cooler under the griddle is making the electrical conduits jump all over. Took it apart to find a locked up compressor. The wiring looked like somebody gave a chimpanzee a roll of electrical tape ans said have at it!
Update - Delfield has agreed to provide 10 hot well replacements. I still have to provide the labor, but that’s $9,000 not coming out of my parts budget.
With your chrome heart shining in the sun, long may you run.
Update - Delfield has agreed to provide 10 hot well replacements. I still have to provide the labor, but that’s $9,000 not coming out of my parts budget.
Wow! That’s fantastic. It was certainly worth the fight.
Good for another 3 1/2 years Next time cut out the lip on the top with a grinder and drop in a Wells Mod-100 units. It takes me about 1 hour per well to do this and it turns out very clean..
Having similar problems with 2 out of my 5 hot wells. I disconnected the white wires and ohm’d them out. The two that are not working were OL and the others that worked were 85ish. Does this affirm the well heating pad is “open” similar to the ones in this thread. Hesitant to pull it apart to further investigate as from the pics it looks like a headache and a half. Have had this service counter in use not even a year now. Hoping it’s not a trend.
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Originally Posted by EjBreeze
got a friend in the security world who sells them
