A challenge to keep cool
Keeping up with summer demand difficult for two icemakers

Keeping cool when the temperatures soar past the triple-digits can be difficult – but it’s nowhere near the challenge of keeping things frozen.

But that’s the task companies like AZ Wholesale Water and Ice and Reddy Ice in Lake Havasu City take on each day. Both businesses deliver several tons of ice to more than 200 residential and commercial customers everyday during the summer months. The difference from the winter to the summer can mean not only quadrupling electric bills but also a quadrupling customer base. And converting water into the bags of ice that thousands of people pick up everyday at convenience stores around town is no easy task.

“The hotter it gets, the more difficult it gets and some days it’s a panic because people have to have it,” said AZ Wholesale Water and Ice co-owner Lee Schaeffer. “Other than trucking ice in the middle of Saudi Arabia, Lake Havasu is probably one of the toughest places in the world to keep ice frozen. It hits that sun and it melts instantly.”

Schaeffer, who brought his company to Lake Havasu City in 2005, said the higher temperatures not only make manufacturing and delivery more difficult, but it also makes demand skyrocket.

“They absolutely need it and this job never stops in the summer,” Schaeffer said. “People come here from California and all over ,and that temperature goes up and they expect to find their ice everywhere.”

AZ Wholesale Water and Ice co-owner Clay Connelly agreed.

“For ice consumption, we have one of the highest demands in the United States,” Connelly said. “The reason is because people don’t go to any other hot places like this for recreation, but this is a recreational town. Next to Death Valley, we’re one of the hottest places around. But we’re not just in the middle of a desert, we’re here for the tourists and the boaters.”

With temperatures not expected to drop below the triple-digits in the foreseeable future, icemakers around town agree that demand is only going to increase.

“July is the toughest month for our refrigeration equipment,” he said. “You open up that trailer at 10 degrees and it immediately hits 60 degrees as soon as you open that back door. It’s a race against the clock before it turns into soupy water. So not only is the demand really high right now, but the difficulty in getting it out there is big too.”

But when those temperatures drop back below 100 degrees, Connelly said the attitude towards ice changes just as rapidly.

“We can’t give it away in the winter,” he said. “From Memorial Day to Labor Day, we do about 80 percent of our business.”

Reddy Ice Plant Manager Dan Sheperd said the difference in the ice-making business between his home state of Massachusetts and Arizona is night and day.

“When I was doing this back east, we would hit customers roughly once a week,” Sheperd said. “Here it’s every day. They can’t get enough of it and some days we almost can’t make it fast enough.”

Towering ice machines at the Reddy Ice facility on Commander Drive in Lake Havasu City make more than 500 pounds of ice in just 23 minutes. Sheperd said the company runs about five to six trucks full of eight to 12 tons of ice each day. Other than a handful of delivery drivers, a few maintenance people and service workers, the ice-making business on the large scale is almost entirely automated.

“I got into this business several years ago when almost everything was done by hand,” Sheperd said. “You had a machine freezing or even cutting the ice but every other job was left up to someone. Manufacturing ice on that scale was some of the most grueling work anyone could ever do.”

But recent technological developments have not only cut down on the number of workers — as nearly a dozen workers were pared down to only about five, Sheperd said – it has also made the process almost twice as fast.

“Only a decade ago we wouldn’t have been able to serve 100 customers a day,” he said. “We could’ve done, at most, maybe 60 to 70 a day. Years ago we couldn’t get ice out fast enough. Now we can keep up.”

You can contact the reporter at nbruttell@havasunews.com