No price list on this page, and no evasion either. Here is what drives the number, what drives the number after the number, and how to compare two quotes that look nothing alike.
Machines that look similar in a brochure diverge on these, and this is where a cheaper quote usually got cheaper.
1 — Condenser and refrigeration capacity. The largest single driver, and the one most easily trimmed to win a quote. A condenser sized to the shelf area rather than to a real water load is how a system gets cheap on paper and slow in production.
2 — Shelf area and shelf construction. Material, internal fluid passages, flatness tolerance and spacing. Shelves are not sheet metal.
3 — Vacuum system. Pumping speed sized for a wet chamber, and pump type and staging.
4 — Controls. Platform, logging depth, and whether it is a supported industrial architecture or a proprietary board with a five-year life.
5 — Build and finish. Chamber material and welding standard, insulation, and the fit-out the application requires.
Purchase price is paid once. Cost per pound of water removed is paid on every batch for the life of the machine.
Energy per cycle, labour per cycle, maintenance and consumables, and the cost of the batches you do not make because the cycle runs long — that last one rarely appears in any comparison and is frequently the largest number of the four.
Run it yourself: the cost-per-pound calculator takes your utility rate, labour and batch data and returns your dollars per pound of water removed. That is the figure that makes two quotes comparable. We do not publish ours, because it would be a claim about your operation rather than a fact about ours.
Ask all six of every vendor including us. The pattern in the answers is the actual information.
What is the condenser ice capacity, and at what condenser temperature? What refrigeration capacity, at what ambient? What pumping speed, and sized against what vapour load? What is the controls platform and its support horizon? What is the shelf flatness tolerance? And what removal rate will this system sustain on my product, in writing?
The last one is the one that separates suppliers. A vendor who will commit to a rate on your product has done the arithmetic. One who quotes a generic capacity has not.
Being straight about the limits of a public page.
Indicative budget ranges by configuration class. [SPEC — Nick to confirm] A meaningful range needs the configuration, and the configuration needs your water load — which is why the quote form asks about your product rather than your budget first.
It depends primarily on condenser and refrigeration capacity, then shelf area and construction, vacuum system, controls platform and build standard. Two systems with the same shelf area can differ substantially because the condenser was sized differently. The operating cost — dollars per pound of water removed — usually outweighs purchase price over the machine’s life.
Because these are engineered-to-order systems and a list price for a configuration that has not been specified is a number with nothing behind it. What we publish instead is the full cost-driver list and a calculator that turns any quote into a comparable figure.
Convert both to dollars per pound of water removed using your own utility and labour rates, and ask both vendors for a written sustained removal rate on your specific product. Shelf area comparisons are the trap.