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How to Properly Clean your Kitchen’s Vent Hood
In order to be efficient, employees must be able to make the most out of their kitchen equipment. That means working with clean, well-maintained and perfectly functional appliances, which in turn means reducing to the minimum the risk of accumulated grease to become an extreme fire hazard and pass with flying colors and excellent scores every restaurant inspection.
By performing a kitchen exhaust cleaning or vent hood cleaning, the goal is to remove all the grease that has accumulated in ducts, hoods, fans and vents. How often is necessary to perform a thorough cleaning of your kitchen’s exhaust system? It depends on the type of cooking and the volume your restaurant produces, being fast-food restaurants with long hours of cooking as the ones that require the most frequent cleaning. Frequent inspections are therefore necessary to determine the right time to clean the system. Common cleaning intervals are monthly, every two months, quarterly, semiannually and annually, but it ultimately depends on usage to determine the amount of grease before it gets to accumulate and poses a threat to the employees’ safety.
Kitchen Vent Hood cleaning process
The cleaning process that we follow at ProTech is exhaustive and thorough, and it’s divided in several phases:
Preparation: All gas valves and pilot lights are shut off before we start any work. The vent hoods are wrapped in plastic and a funnel is created to allow the flow of greasy fluids into a bin. Plastic sheets are wrapped on all equipment to prevent any grease splatter during the cleaning process. Baffle filters are removed so that the exhaust ducts can be accessed. Once everything’s in place, we begin the cleaning process.
Servicing: The practices we follow in the vent hood cleaning process are outlined in the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), the organization that creates and confirms abidance of the standards for fire prevention in the United States of America.
The exhaust system components are sprayed and rinsed many times to ensure that they are thoroughly clean. Cleaning agents are sprayed on the blades of the exhaust fans so that the excess grease dissolves. These are then rinsed in hot water. The process is repeated with the ducts and other parts to ensure thorough cleaning.
Different methods of cleaning can be applied to the filters: they can be scraped, cleaned by hand using hot-water pressure washing, using a high-temperature industrial dishwasher, or soaked overnight. Food-safe caustic chemicals are used to dissolve the grease and are thoroughly rinsed out after the cleaning process. Our teams will always check the manufacturer’s recommendations of your filter to ensure proper cleaning without deterioration of its components -some cleaning agents may affect filters made with special materials, such as galvanized steel or aluminum, which in turn lead to discoloration or corrosion-.
Clean-up: Once all the components are cleansed, we ensure that the floors, countertops and other areas are also thoroughly cleaned. We dry out the equipment and reinstall every component. Our technicians will leave your facility only when everything is in order and you are satisfied with the service.
Check out ProTech Vent Hood Cleaning services. We have over 35 years of experience working with restaurants, restaurant chains, hotels ans school disctricts across the state of Texas. Our experts will take care of all the exhaust systems with impeccable results. Our 24/7 response team will be happy to help, just contact us. Hood vent cleaning in Texas now!