I've been meaning to do something like this for ages. I work in hospitality and I've been buying and selling secondhand commercial kitchen equipment on the side for maybe three or four years now. It started with a prep table I picked up from a sandwich shop that was closing down in Morecambe. Forty quid. Same table brand new would have been three hundred and something. After that I just kept an eye out.
The thing is, when a restaurant or a pub closes, there's usually a load of perfectly good kit that needs to go somewhere. Sometimes it goes to an auction house, sometimes a clearance company takes it, sometimes the landlord just wants it gone and puts it on eBay for whatever they can get. And most of the time the prices are daft because the people selling don't really know what they've got, and the people buying are mostly after new stuff because that's what they're used to.
I've done alright out of it, to be honest. Nothing life-changing, but decent enough that I keep doing it. I've bought combi ovens, dishwashers, prep tables, vacuum packers, contact grills, all sorts. Some of it I've kept for myself or mates who needed something for a project. A fair bit I've sold on, either on eBay or locally to people setting up new places.
I've also made some proper mistakes along the way. Bought a three-phase fryer once without thinking about who was actually going to buy it off me. Turns out the market for three-phase stuff is a lot smaller than you'd think, and it sat in my mate's garage for about four months before I shifted it at barely what I paid. You live and learn.
Anyway, this is just somewhere I'm going to write about what I've picked up along the way. What's worth buying, what to avoid, where to find stuff, that sort of thing. Hopefully it's useful to someone.