We cleaned a commercial range for a Cafe in Weston Super Mare recently. The cafe had just been taken over by a new owner. We tend to get lots of commercial cleans from new owners as they can't believe how dirty the oven etc have been left by the previous owner.
Alan went and cleaned and it a tremendous job but when we got the cheque from the owner he wrote a letter with it to say that he 'was somewhat peeved by the fact that there was a notice on the front of the range cooker saying 'DO NOT USE' and that he had wasted his money. This is strange to me as most domestic ovens only cost at the max £100 to fix.
On speaking to Alan he said that he had seen the small sticky note but it was greasy and the writing had run and so it looked like an old note. He had asked one of the people from the cafe there if they knew whether the previous owner had used the range. They replied positively to this saying that yes he had them that he had been using it right up to before handing over the business.
So in all we will be now be making sure that new owners, especially, check everything about their newly acquired commercial cooking apparatus before asking us to clean it. I personally get the owners to show me at the beginning that everything is working before I start. I will make sure that Alan does this in future.
I gave someone a quote this week - they had taken over a pub just outside Yeovil and were in the process of completely refurbishing it - and I told them to check everything out before we cleaned it. As they were waiting on a delivery of LPG which had been delayed they are going to get back to us. Apparently you can't seem to get fast LPG deliveries which is strange to me especially when you run a pub and depend on it for cooking.
