We clean hoods down to bare metal

Each visit covers the whole exhaust system

The hood you see over the cooking line is only one part of the system. Hot, greasy air rises into the hood, passes through the filters, climbs a metal duct and leaves through a fan on the roof. Grease settles along that whole path, and it settles thickest in the places nobody looks. A regular visit from us covers every part of it, from the filters to the fan. No section gets skipped because it is hard to reach.

Before we start, the cooking line has to be off and cold. We wrap the equipment under the hood in plastic so the dirty water drains into a container, not across your floor. The filters come out and get pressure washed on their own. Then we scrape the heavy grease off the inside of the hood and the duct by hand. Degreaser goes on after that, and hot water washes it down until bare metal shows.

The last stop is the roof. The fan up there pulls every bit of that air, so its blades and housing collect a heavy coat of grease. We tip the fan back on its hinge and scrape and wash the blades. With the fan tipped back, we can also clean the opening of the duct underneath. Back in the kitchen, the filters go in and we run the fan to check that it pulls air. Done right, you can wipe a finger inside the hood and it comes away clean.

• Cooking line covered in plastic first
• Filters pulled and pressure washed
• Hood scraped and washed to bare metal
• Ducts cleaned from the hood to the roof
• Rooftop fan tipped back and degreased

Grease gets harder to remove over time

Fresh grease on a hood is soft and pale, and it washes off easily. Every day of cooking adds a new layer on top, and the heat from the line slowly bakes the older layers underneath. After enough months, those layers turn into a dark, hard crust. A hood cleaned on schedule only ever carries a thin, soft film. A hood that missed a visit or two has a crust that must be scraped by hand. Some of it may never fully come off.

That crust is fuel. A flare-up on the grill or a pan fire on the range can pull flame up into the filters. If the filters and duct are coated, the fire has something to burn, and it can climb the duct where nobody can reach it. A fire suppression system over a cooking line protects the cooking surface and the mouth of the duct. It cannot reach every foot of duct between the hood and the roof.

Skipped visits hurt the rooftop fan too. Grease builds up unevenly on the blades, so the fan wobbles and wears through belts faster. A greasy fan also moves less air. You notice that in the kitchen first, when smoke starts rolling out past the front of the hood and the line runs hot. Grease that should have gone up the duct settles on the walls and the equipment instead. By the time a kitchen feels smoky, the system is usually well overdue.

Phoenix heat is hard on rooftop fans

A rooftop fan in Phoenix sits in full sun most of the year, on a roof that gets far hotter than the air. That heat keeps the grease inside the fan soft and runny. Instead of staying on the blades, it drains out of the fan housing. A small grease catch on the side of the fan holds some of it, but in this heat it can fill and overflow between cleanings. Then the grease runs onto the roof itself.

Many restaurants around Phoenix are in strip centers and older single-story buildings with flat roofs. A lot of those roofs are sprayed foam with a coating on top, or tar and gravel on the older ones. Grease damages both. It softens the coating and soaks into the roof, and a greasy patch next to a fan is a fire risk of its own. So on each visit we check the roof around the fan along with the fan itself.

Monsoon season adds its own problem. The dust storms that sweep across the Phoenix area coat everything on the roof, and dust sticks to grease. On the fan blades the two turn into a gritty paste that throws the fan out of balance faster than grease alone. Phoenix water is also very hard, so a stainless hood that air dries after a rinse ends up covered in white spots. We wipe the hood down after the final rinse so it dries clean.

Your menu sets the cleaning schedule

There is no single schedule that fits every kitchen, because grease builds up based on what you cook and how much. A kitchen that cooks over wood or charcoal builds up the fastest and often needs cleaning every month. A busy line running fryers and grills all day usually needs it about every three months. A kitchen that cooks lightly, like a small coffee shop, can often go six months or longer between visits. Those are starting points, and what we find in your own system sets the real schedule.

That is why the first step is a free inspection. We check how thick the grease is on the filters and inside the hood, then go up and look at the fan on the roof. The amount we find tells us how fast your kitchen builds it up. From there we set a schedule that brings us back before the grease gets thick again. If your menu or your hours change, the schedule should change with them.

Between visits, your staff can pull the filters and wash them in hot water every week or so. That keeps grease from dripping back onto the line, and it makes our next visit go faster. It does nothing for the duct and the fan above the filters, which is where a fire would spread. The schedule covers those parts, so you never have to guess when they were last cleaned. Mark Moreno wrote "Good communication left my hood spotless" in a Google review, and that is what every visit should leave you with.