Cleaning your vent hood by yourself vs. hiring professionals: what’s best?

Vent hood cleaning is a necessary part of the overall kitchen hygiene. Whether is performed by your staff, yourself or hired professionals, a frequent, thorough cleaning in accordance with the National Fire Protection Association specifications is mandatory for numerous reasons, some of which are:

• Neglecting the kitchen’s maintenance may incur penalties and expensive fines. It’s not only risky for your employees and guests but can also cause your license to be suspended.
• The buildup grease in vent hoods and exhaust systems is a fire hazard. Grease fires endanger the life of staff and clients as well as cause material losses that can be very expensive.
• Having a clean kitchen helps you save money. Like avoiding fines and even closures wasn’t enough, keeping the exhaust systems clean also increases the life of its components and saves you from buying costly replacements or making long time repairs.
• Letting the grease build up can lead to blockages and damage to components.

So, letting the grease build up is not a very good option. The next step is to choose between doing the hard work manually or hiring a professional company to do it for you.

Here’s a list of everything you have to do if you choose to do your vent hood maintenance manually:

• Prepare your kitchen: turn off all valves, electric appliances and clear your area of work as much as possible. This is a dirty job, so you’ll need to cover every surface with plastic sheets and be prepared to have grease spills all over the place. Be careful not to fall. You’ll also need to find degreaser products potent enough for the task, and be ready to put some elbow grease into scrubbing. Remember your personal protection equipment because these products can be very irritating.
• Remove and clean filters: especially dirty filters must need to be left soaked overnight in water and degreaser concentrate and then scrubbed with non-abrasive pads or brushes.
• Clean grease traps: this part can be very messy. The collected must be poured into a separate container and discarded safely. It must not be dumped into the drain –this can lead to blockages. Then every component must be scrubbed and thoroughly cleaned with degreaser solution. These traps are often very big and difficult to handle by yourself and might need to soak overnight just like the filters.
• Clean fans and blades: removing these components need some unscrewing and patience. After you’ve done it, gently scrub them and clean them with degreaser solution. They might need soaking as well.
• Clean all the ducts: depending on the size of your kitchen exhaust system, this might be the most tedious part of the job. Using the same degreaser solution, non-abrasive pads or brushes and without forgetting your personal protection equipment, start to scrub the inside and outside of the ducts. Duct access doors might be very helpful to complete this task.

Hours later, when everything’s finally clean and dry –and given all screws are found after this whole ordeal- you can finally reassemble the system. Hopefully, you won’t have to replace or repair any component. Remembering the exact order of reassembling might be tricky, so taking pictures or even recording the process could help a lot.

Now you can finally throw yourself into bed and rest for a week, and chances are you won’t schedule another cleaning any time soon, however you should know about the consequences of inappropriate Vent Hood Cleaning here.

What are the advantages of hiring a company like ProTech?

As an established and experienced company, we offer a range of services in Houston that include:

• Commercial vent hood cleaning
• Commercial restaurant equipment cleaning
• Pressure washing
• Commercial oven cleaning services
• Grease trap and dumpster area cleaning
• Duct access panel installation
• And other facility solutions

As you see, we’re taking care of everything for you. Rest assured regarding the pricing of the commercial restaurant equipment cleaning services as we charge competitively. Save yourself the time, effort and possible mishaps in the making.

We have a long list of satisfied clients that have taken our annual maintenance programs. You don’t even have to schedule or call us for routine cleaning as we have an automatic scheduling system. However, we are always available for emergencies or specific cleaning requirements. Trust us for all types of commercial kitchen cleaning services in Houston and let our work speak for ourselves.