We clean everything from hood to fan

We clean every part the grease reaches

The job starts inside the kitchen. The cooking equipment has to be off and cool before we touch anything. We cover the cooking line and the floor so the grease and the wash water land where we can catch them. Then we pull the filters and start on the inside of the hood. Next comes the plenum, the space behind the filters where grease collects first. Thick buildup gets scraped off by hand before any washing, because water just slides over a heavy grease layer.

From the plenum we follow the grease up through the ductwork, every section of it, until we reach the exhaust fan on the roof. The grease trough and the filter rails get cleaned along the way. When that trough clogs, grease that should drain into the cup drips back toward the cooking line instead. Up top, we open the fan and clean the wheel and the inside of the housing. Grease that gets past the filters and the duct ends up coating those blades.

When the job is finished, every surface the grease touched is down to bare metal. Nothing comes off on a fingertip. That is the standard the NFPA fire code sets for kitchen exhaust, and it is the only way to know the fuel is gone. A hood that looks clean at the filters can still have a coated duct right behind it. That is why we keep going past the part you can see. If you want the filters cleaned as part of the visit, tell us when you book.

• Hood interior and plenum scraped and washed
• Grease trough and filter rails cleaned
• All ductwork cleaned from hood to fan
• Rooftop exhaust fan cleaned inside and out
• Dated sticker showing your next due date

Grease left in the duct feeds fires

Grease is fuel. Every day of cooking sends grease vapor up into the hood, and it cools and sticks to the metal as it rises. A flare-up on the charbroiler or a pan fire on the range can pull flame straight into the filters. If the plenum and the duct behind them are coated, the fire has a path to follow, out of sight and up toward the roof. Taking that fuel out of the system is what this job is for.

Trouble usually starts in the parts that are hard to reach. A cleaning that stops at the hood leaves the duct and the fan full of grease. Sideways duct runs are the worst, because grease pools along the bottom instead of draining back down. If a long run has no access panel, nobody can get a scraper into it, and the buildup keeps growing with every cleaning it misses. When we hit a section we cannot reach, it gets photographed as a deficiency so you know it is there.

The fan is the other part that gets skipped, because it means a trip onto the roof. A fan wheel caked with grease runs out of balance and wears out its bearings faster. It also moves less air, so more smoke hangs over the line and more grease settles in the duct instead of leaving it. A skipped fan makes the next cleaning harder, and it leaves fuel sitting right where a duct fire would end up.

Phoenix heat bakes grease onto the metal

Phoenix summers are hard on an exhaust system. The fan sits on a flat roof in full sun, and the metal housing gets hot enough to burn a bare hand. Grease that sits through a long stretch of that heat does not stay soft. It darkens and hardens into a glaze that a quick rinse will not touch. Getting that layer off takes scraping and repeated passes with hot water. A system left too long over the summer is a bigger job by fall.

Then there is the dust. The summer storms that roll across the Valley drop fine dirt on every rooftop in town, and it sticks to anything with grease on it. The fan and the top of the duct end up with a gritty crust that holds on harder than grease alone. Filters clog faster during storm season too, and a clogged filter chokes the airflow the whole system depends on. A fan that goes a whole summer without a cleaning takes real work to get back to bare metal.

Most restaurants around Phoenix sit in strip centers or stand-alone buildings with concrete block walls and flat roofs. In those, the duct usually rises straight up through the roof to the fan, which is the simplest layout to clean. Kitchens in older brick buildings downtown or inside industrial plants are a different job. Their ducts can run sideways for a long stretch before they reach the roof. Every one of those horizontal runs needs access panels, or nobody can clean it properly.

Every cleaning ends with photos and stickers

Most of an exhaust system is out of sight, above the ceiling and up on the roof. So we document it. Before we start, we photograph the system. When the service is complete, we photograph all of it again, from the hood up to the fan. Any deficiency we find, like a duct section with no access panel, gets its own photos. You end up with a clear record of what your system looked like when we arrived and what it looks like when we leave.

Before we leave, we put a sticker on the hood with the date of the cleaning and the date the next one is due. The NFPA fire code calls for that sticker, and it tells anyone who checks the kitchen when the system was last done. Every access panel we open or inspect gets its own sticker showing what was done there. After we finish, you can see which parts of the system we reached and what we did at each one.

Our managers visit customers after a cleaning to look at the work and hear how it went. We run a quality control division for that, so the job gets checked by someone besides the technicians who did it. Good communication matters on this job, because the kitchen has to be shut down and ready when we arrive. Mark Moreno wrote in his Google review: "Good communication left my hood spotless". That is the result we want on every hood we clean.