Equipment sizing

How many group heads, grinders, ice and cold storage a bar needs — sized from peak demand and par levels, not from floor area.

How much equipment, and how you know. Each section names the input that determines the answer, then the input operators use instead and what that substitution produces.

This page gives the method, not the magnitudes. A cup-count that fits one venue is fabricated for every other, so you supply the peak volume and the page supplies the reasoning. Every section below is an expression you complete with your own numbers.

Group heads — from peak cups per hour

Decision driver: Peak cups per hour: the worst single hour you expect to serve, counted rather than estimated. Not the daily total, and never the floor area.

The wrong driver, and what it produces: Floor area. It is the number the landlord, the fit-out drawing and the supplier quotation all already have, so it is the number that gets used — and it describes the room rather than the queue. Two rooms of identical area, one taking its trade evenly across the day and one taking most of it in a short morning spike, need different machines, and area cannot tell them apart. Sized from area, the bar with the spike gets a machine that queues at the only hour that matters; the bar with the even spread gets capital standing idle, warm-up energy it does not need, and one more group to clean every night. Both errors are invisible on the drawing and obvious in the first trading week.

How to size it

Count the peak hour before shortlisting anything. If the site is already trading, export the till by hour rather than estimating — it is the cheapest sizing input available and most operators already hold it. If it is not trading, count a comparable hour somewhere else and write down that you did.
Convert the hour into simultaneous demand, not a total. What a group limits is how many drinks can be in extraction at once; what the boiler limits is how fast steam returns between them. A menu that is mostly milk drinks is governed by the second constraint and will look adequately grouped right up to the moment it queues.
Divide by what one group sustains on the machine being bought, and get that divisor from the supplier under continuous load rather than assuming it. The whole calculation rests on this number and it is the one nobody asks for. A supplier who cannot state it under load has told you something about the machine.
Add a group only where two people will stand at the bar at the same time. A group nobody is standing at produces nothing, and still costs warm-up energy, cleaning time and the bar length the cold-build surface needed.
Read the day-total thresholds as a cross-check, not as the method. The espresso machine entry carries them as planning figures; open them after the peak hour has been counted, never instead of counting it.
Settle the grinder count in the same decision. Group count and grinder count are two halves of one throughput question, and buying the third group before the second grinder is the commonest way to pay for capacity the coffee cannot use.

Figures

Group count: peak cups/hour ÷ cups/hour one group sustains, rounded up · An expression rather than a figure, deliberately. The divisor belongs to the machine being bought and has to come from the supplier under continuous load; filling it in here would produce a group count that looks calculated and is not.

How the wrong answer shows up after opening

The queue forms at one hour of the day and at no other. That is an under-grouped bar, and no amount of training moves it.
A group is clean at close because nobody used it. That is capital and nightly cleaning time bought for nothing, usually in the space the cold-build surface needed.
Shots run fast and sour late in the rush with no grind change. The machine has the groups and not the steam recovery, which is the constraint that was never sized.

Equipment this sizes: Espresso machine · Portafilter · Precision filter baskets

Grinders — one per coffee, and decaf is a coffee

Decision driver: The number of different coffees on the bar. One grinder per coffee; espresso plus decaf is the minimum, not the aspiration. The count does not scale with volume — a quiet bar serving two coffees needs two grinders exactly as a busy one does.

The wrong driver, and what it produces: Budget, applied as though the grinder were an accessory to the machine. The grinder decides particle distribution and particle distribution decides extraction, so a second group without a second grinder buys throughput the coffee cannot use. The order in which the two are bought is the single clearest signal of whether a bar was specified by someone who has worked one.

How to size it

Count the coffees, not the drinks. Two beans on the bar is two grinders whatever the menu length, and a single espresso blend with decaf beside it is already two coffees.
Understand what switching one grinder between two coffees actually costs, in both of its parts. The burrs and the chute hold a retained dose of the previous coffee, so the first shots after a switch are a blend of the two; and the two coffees do not extract at the same setting, so the setting is moved and then has to be found again on the way back.
Then accept what a team will actually do about that cost, because this is the part sizing gets wrong. They will stop switching. Faced with a purge-and-recalibrate cycle in the middle of a queue, a barista serves the decaf order from the caffeinated grinder, or on the caffeinated setting, and says nothing. The single grinder does not produce a slower bar — it produces an undocumented recipe change on a subset of orders that nobody records.
Note that retention makes this a substitution rather than an inconsistency. A decaf drink pulled from a grinder that has just ground caffeinated coffee contains some of that coffee, and the bar has no way to say how much. The customer asked for no caffeine and did not get it, which is why this is the one grinder argument that is not about flavour.
Treat filter or brewed coffee as a third coffee and a third grinder. Espresso and filter settings sit at opposite ends of the range, so sharing a grinder between them is the switching cost above with the largest possible setting move and the longest recovery.
Buy grinder quality before group count. An ordinary machine with a consistent grinder outperforms an excellent machine with an inconsistent one, and where the budget forces the order, this one is not close.
Give every grinder its own position at the station, with hand clearance at the hopper and the burr chamber. Two grinders sharing one footprint reintroduce the switching problem as a physical queue, and a grinder wedged too tight to open is a grinder nobody cleans.

Figures

Grinder count: 1 per coffee on the bar (espresso + decaf = 2) · A structural minimum rather than a measured threshold, which is why it carries the planning label rather than reading as a fact. It is a function of the menu, not of the volume, so it is the one sizing answer on this page that does not move with trade.

How the wrong answer shows up after opening

Decaf tastes like the house espresso. It is being ground on the house setting, or from the house grinder, or both.
The purge bin is empty at close on a day decaf was sold. Nothing was purged, so nothing was switched.
The grind setting at open is not where it was left at close, with no bean change recorded. Somebody moved it during service and moved it back incompletely.

Equipment this sizes: Espresso grinder · Dedicated filter grinder

Ice — from peak draw, derated for high ambient

Decision driver: Peak-hour draw against bin capacity, with the machine's published output derated for the ambient air and inlet water temperatures it will actually run in. Two constraints and two temperatures. The daily total is none of them.

The wrong driver, and what it produces: The published production rating, read as though it were the bar's capacity. It is a full-day output measured under the manufacturer's stated ambient and inlet water conditions, and it is the largest number on the specification sheet — so it is the number models get compared on and the number a quotation is built around. A bar does not draw ice evenly across a day and does not run at the rating conditions. Sized this way the machine is adequate on paper for the day and empty at the hour the iced orders arrive, and the shortfall is read on the bar as a broken machine rather than as a sizing decision.

How to size it

Separate the two constraints before any arithmetic. Production is a rate — how fast ice is replaced. Bin capacity is a buffer — how much is available before the rate is all you have. A rush draws the buffer down faster than any machine refills it, so the bar's real ceiling during a peak is the bin, and the machine's job is to have refilled it before the next peak arrives.
Derate the published output for the conditions the machine will actually run in. Output falls as ambient air temperature rises and falls again as inlet water temperature rises, and in a hot climate both move together: the air is hot, the incoming supply is warm, and a machine in an enclosed under-counter position is breathing its own exhaust on top of that. The reduction is real, material, and specific to the model.
Take that reduction from the manufacturer's own ambient-derating table or curve for the unit being bought, and from nowhere else. A percentage carried across from another model, another site or a remembered rule of thumb is an invented figure with a plausible shape, and this page will not supply one. A supplier who cannot produce the curve has given you a selection finding.
State the ambient the machine will see, not the room's design temperature. An under-counter unit in a closed cabinet behind a bar, with a hot machine beside it, is not at room temperature. Air-cooled output is set by the air the condenser can actually reach; water-cooled and remote-condenser arrangements change that question rather than answering it, and each brings its own supply, drainage and heat-rejection requirements.
Count the peak draw from the menu rather than from a per-cover figure. Which drinks contain ice, how much each one takes, and how many of those arrive in the worst hour — the operator holds all three inputs and nobody else does. This is the one calculation on this page whose inputs cannot come from a reference at all.
Size the bin against consecutive peak hours, not one. Two peaks separated by a quiet period are two draws with a refill between them; two that run together are one long draw and the bin has to cover the whole of it unaided.
Match the ice form to the drinks before matching the capacity. Cube, nugget and flake differ in density and in melt rate, so a machine sized in mass for one form does not deliver the same volume or the same dilution in another. Blended drinks and chilled display are different requirements again, and a single machine serving all of them is a compromise that should be made knowingly.
Confirm heat rejection, water supply and drainage at the same time as capacity, not after the position is fixed. A machine rejects heat into the space it stands in unless it is water-cooled or remote, and that heat lands on the bar's cooling load — which is a line in the electrical and clearance sections of this same page.

Figures

Bin sizing target: peak-hour ice draw × consecutive peak hours · An expression over the operator's own counts, not a figure. Every input belongs to one menu and one trading pattern, so a magnitude printed here would be a quantity from a different bar wearing this one's label. Planning rather than measured: the shape of the calculation is a heuristic, and the numbers that go into it are the reader's.

What determines this, and who confirms it: Ambient derating is model-specific and is taken from the manufacturer's published curve for the unit selected. Condenser type, heat rejection, water supply and drainage are site questions confirmed by the mechanical and plumbing trades against the code in force locally, before the position is fixed. This section states what determines the answer; it does not state the answer, and no figure on it should be read as one.

How the wrong answer shows up after opening

The bin is empty during the rush and full at close. Production is adequate and the buffer is not, which is the failure the daily rating cannot see.
Somebody is buying bagged ice on the busiest days. The sizing error is already being paid for, and it rarely reaches any report as an equipment problem.
Output fell in the hot months and the machine was called faulty. That fall is the derating curve, not a fault — check the curve against the actual ambient before booking a service call.
Iced drinks are being built with less ice than the recipe so the bin lasts. The recipe has changed, on a subset of orders, and nobody wrote it down.

Operator observation — one site: An operator's account, one site. At a Gulf venue, ice capacity was planned at roughly double what the demand calculation asked for, ahead of a peak-season surge — and it was still tight. Peak ambient and peak demand arrived in the same weeks, so the derating and the draw both moved the wrong way at once, and the margin that looked generous on the plan was consumed by the two of them together. This is one operator's recollection of one site's planning decision and how it turned out. It is not a measurement, it is not a derating factor, and doubling a capacity calculation because of it would be doing exactly what the account warns against — substituting somebody else's margin for your own conditions. What transfers is the mechanism, not the multiplier: in a hot climate the derating and the demand peak coincide, so a margin sized against one of them is not a margin against both.

Equipment this sizes: Ice machine

Refrigeration — from par levels and delivery frequency

Decision driver: Par level multiplied by the interval between deliveries, plus the overlap of a delivery that lands before the previous one is used up. A volume of stock over a period of time — not the number of cabinets, and not the length of the bar.

The wrong driver, and what it produces: Cabinet count, chosen to fill the under-counter run. The joinery drawing has a number of bays and the bays get filled, so the bar ends up with the refrigeration that fits rather than the refrigeration the stock needs. Undersized, it forces a mid-shift trip to a back store — the movement that quietly turns into ordering less and running out. Oversized, it is a cabinet held at temperature all year to store air, paid for on every door opening and every compressor cycle.

How to size it

Start from par levels, because they are the quantity that has to be cold at the same time. If par levels do not exist yet, that is the first piece of work — sizing refrigeration before them is sizing against a guess and calling it a calculation.
Multiply by the delivery interval, then add one delivery of overlap. Stock does not run to zero and get replaced at the same instant: the new delivery lands while the old is still in use, and the cabinet has to hold both. A calculation without the overlap term is short by exactly one delivery, on every delivery day, forever.
Split the volume by temperature and by traffic before choosing cabinets. Milk under the steam wand is a per-drink door opening; back-up stock is a per-shift one. One cabinet serving both puts the whole store's temperature at the mercy of the busiest door on the bar.
Separate allergen and open-product storage physically, at the sizing stage rather than later. Plant milks, opened dairy and prepared items each need a place of their own, and deciding that after the cabinets arrive means deciding it as a shelf reshuffle under pressure.
Size for recovery in the ambient the bar actually runs at, not for holding in a cool room. Under-counter refrigeration in a hot bar with a hot machine beside it works harder after every opening, and recovery — not holding — is what a temperature log records during service.
Confirm airflow and heat rejection before the position is fixed. A cabinet built into a sealed joinery run cannot reject heat, and that failure arrives months later as a compressor that never stops.
Check the delivery interval against what the supplier will commit to, not what is on offer. A sizing built on a more frequent delivery than the supplier guarantees is a smaller cabinet and a recurring shortage that will be blamed on ordering.

Figures

Cold storage volume: par level × delivery interval + one delivery of overlap · The overlap term is the one routinely dropped, and dropping it produces a cabinet short by one delivery on every delivery day. Planning rather than measured: the par levels are the operator's and the interval is the supplier's, so neither number can come from here.

How the wrong answer shows up after opening

Stock is kept in a back room and fetched during service. The bar's refrigeration is short and the difference is being paid in walking rather than in equipment.
One cabinet is full of a single product's back-up while another product has no cold home. The volume is adequate and the split is wrong.
Temperature logs are fine at open and drift by mid-service. That is recovery, not holding — the cabinet was sized for a quieter bar than this one.

Equipment this sizes: Underbar refrigeration · Underbar milk fridge

Filtration — specified only after the supply is tested

Decision driver: The test result for the water at this address. Not the machine manual, not the last site, not a regional assumption. Until the supply has been tested there is nothing to specify, and a specification written before the test is a guess with an invoice attached.

The wrong driver, and what it produces: The manufacturer's recommended cartridge, ordered alongside the machine. It is convenient, it arrives with the delivery, and it is a specification written without knowing what is in the water it will treat. The same cartridge that protects a boiler on one supply will strip another to the point where the coffee tastes hollow, and the reverse error — treating for taste on a supply whose real problem is carbonate hardness — is a scaled boiler on a maintenance schedule that looks compliant throughout.

How to size it

Test first, and test the supply as it arrives at this address rather than as the municipality publishes it. Whatever sits between the mains and the bar counts: a building tank, a softener already installed upstream, or a long riser that warms through the hot months.
Test for the parameters that actually determine the decision — total hardness and its split between carbonate and non-carbonate, alkalinity, total dissolved solids, chloride and free chlorine. Each one points at a different treatment, and treating hardness when the problem is chloride is money spent on the wrong failure.
Then choose the treatment the result indicates. Carbonate hardness is a scale problem and points at ion exchange or scale inhibition; taste and odour point at carbon; a high dissolved-solids reading points at reverse osmosis with remineralisation and blending behind it, because water stripped to nothing extracts badly and is aggressive to the metal it then sits in.
Treat at one point, upstream of the split to every hot machine. Treating the espresso machine and leaving the tea boiler on raw supply produces two different cups from one recipe and two different descaling intervals from one maintenance plan.
Size the cartridge on throughput rather than on the machine's footprint. Capacity is a volume of water, so the change interval is set by the bar's litres — and a cartridge sized for a quiet bar, installed in a busy one, is a scaling boiler behind a filter that looks like protection.
Retest after any change to the supply and on a schedule regardless. Municipal supply is not constant, a building tank changes with the season, and a specification written once was correct once.
Make the cartridge reachable without moving anything. A filter head behind a fixed cabinet is a change that gets deferred, and a deferred change is the same as no filtration for however long it is deferred.

What determines this, and who confirms it: Feed-water limits are set by the equipment manufacturer's stated requirement for the machine being installed, and the supply is characterised by a test of the water at this address. Potable-supply protection and backflow prevention are governed locally and are confirmed by a licensed plumber. This section states which parameters decide the specification; it does not state a threshold for any of them.

How the wrong answer shows up after opening

Scale appears in a boiler that has a filter fitted. The filter is the wrong treatment for this water, or it was sized for a smaller bar than this one.
Coffee tastes hollow and flat across every recipe after a treatment change. The water has been stripped and not remineralised, and no grind adjustment will recover it.
Nobody can say when the cartridge was last changed. Nobody can say what is being treated either, which is operationally the same position as no treatment at all.

Equipment this sizes: Water supply test kit · Sediment and carbon filtration · Ion-exchange softener · Reverse osmosis unit · Remineralisation and blending · Scale-inhibition cartridge

Electrical load — what determines it, and who confirms it

Decision driver: The total connected load of the equipment actually selected, set against the supply the site actually has. Both halves are specific to this list and this building, and neither is a figure this page can supply.

The wrong driver, and what it produces: The assumption that the existing supply is adequate because the unit was a café before. Fit-outs change equipment, and the previous tenant's schedule is not this one. The check that replaces the assumption is a survey of what is installed against a schedule of what is being installed — the cheapest thing on this page to do early, and among the most expensive to discover late.

How to size it

Build the connected-load schedule before selecting, not after. Every item that draws power goes on it, including the ones that are easy to leave off: the ice machine, the under-counter refrigeration, the water boiler, the blender, the till and the display screens.
Establish what the supply provides and how much of it is already committed to the rest of the premises. Available capacity is what remains after the kitchen, the air conditioning and the lighting, and a bar is rarely the only load on a shared board.
Treat single versus three phase as an outcome of those two, never as a preference. Which one the site needs depends on the equipment selected and the supply available; some equipment is offered in both, and the choice changes the machine as well as the wiring.
Identify which items need a dedicated circuit rather than a shared one. High-draw equipment with a heating element is the usual case, and sharing such a circuit with the rest of the bar is how a rush trips a board.
Have a licensed electrician confirm the whole schedule against the code in force locally before anything is ordered, and establish the local authority's requirements at the same time. This page states no amperage, no phase requirement, no circuit rating and no cable size, because those are determined by the installation and the jurisdiction.
Book that confirmation before the equipment order rather than before the delivery. Discovering the supply after the machine has arrived is a delayed opening, and it is the most common single cause of one in this section.
Extend the same discipline to ventilation and heat rejection. Duct sizing, extraction rate and make-up air are determined by the appliances installed and by local code, and are confirmed by the mechanical contractor — the same rule, a different trade.

What determines this, and who confirms it: Connected load, circuit provision, phase and protection are determined by the equipment schedule and by the supply at the site, and are confirmed by a licensed electrician against the code in force locally. Ventilation, duct sizing and heat rejection are determined the same way and confirmed by the mechanical contractor. Nothing on this page substitutes for either confirmation, and no figure on this page should be presented to a contractor as a requirement.

How the wrong answer shows up after opening

The board trips during the rush and at no other time. Loads are coinciding, and a dedicated circuit was probably not provided where one was needed.
The equipment order has been placed and the electrical survey has not happened. The opening date now depends on an answer nobody has asked for.
A supplier's quotation states the supply requirement and nobody has checked it against the building. That is the manufacturer's requirement for the machine, not a survey of this site.

This section links to no equipment because it sizes a site requirement — connected load against available supply — rather than a purchase. The empty list is the correct end state, not a gap waiting to be filled.

Clearances and working depth

Decision driver: The deepest thing that has to open, plus the person who has to stand in front of it while it is open. Depth is set by use, not by the footprint on the drawing.

The wrong driver, and what it produces: The equipment footprint, taken from the specification sheet and drawn to fit. A footprint is the space a machine occupies standing still; it says nothing about the portafilter swinging out of the group, the fridge door opening toward the barista, the burr chamber coming off for cleaning, or the person who has to be somewhere while any of that happens. A bar drawn to footprints fits on paper and does not work on the first shift, and it is the one category of error on this page that a purchase order cannot revise.

How to size it

Add the swing to every door and every hinged part before adding anything else. An under-counter door that cannot open fully is a cabinet that gets loaded badly, and a machine that has to be pulled out to be worked on is a machine that gets serviced late.
Measure working depth against the team that will stand there, at the counter height being built. Comfortable reach and working depth vary between people, and a bar sized on one person's reach is a bar the rest of the team leans across all day.
Leave overhead clearance for the motion rather than for the object. The portafilter has to lift and seat; the tallest steaming jug has to go under the wand at the wand's working angle with the jug tilted, not sitting flat under a vertical wand; the hopper has to come off the grinder.
Leave service access at the sides and the back of anything plumbed or filtered. Access designed out at the drawing stage is a maintenance interval that quietly lengthens, and nobody attributes the lengthening to the drawing.
Leave the airflow clearance that heat-rejecting equipment needs, on the faces it needs it on, and confirm those faces against the manufacturer's installation instruction rather than assuming they are the back. An air-cooled machine built into a sealed run cannot reject heat, and the consequence arrives as reduced output long before it arrives as a fault.
Size the aisle for two people passing where two will work, and for one turning where one will. An aisle that fits one person comfortably is the constraint that appears in every layout review as "the bar is slow" and in no equipment list at all.
Fix clearances before the joinery is ordered. Every other decision on this page can be revised with a purchase order; this one is revised with a saw.

Figures

Working depth at a station: deepest appliance + its door or lid swing + the working depth of the person using it · An expression rather than a dimension, because a dimension here would have been measured on a different bar with a different team. The terms are precisely the ones that get left out, and leaving any of them out is how a station fits on the drawing and does not work in use.

What determines this, and who confirms it: Aisle widths, means of escape, accessible-reach provision and any clearance required around a fixed appliance are governed by local building and food-premises codes and are confirmed by the fit-out contractor and the authority having jurisdiction. Ventilation clearances around an individual appliance are governed by that appliance's installation instruction.

How the wrong answer shows up after opening

A door is routinely opened part way. The clearance is short and the team has already adapted to it without reporting it.
A piece of equipment has to be moved to be cleaned or serviced. It is not being cleaned or serviced on schedule, and nobody will say so.
Two people on the bar are slower than one. The aisle is sized for one, and no amount of sequencing recovers it.

Equipment this sizes: Bar counter and worktop substrate · Under-counter carcass and modular bar cabinetry · Espresso machine · Underbar refrigeration · Steaming pitcher

Equipment, workflow & commissioning