The most critical and crucial component of maintaining a successful kitchen business is taking care of your machinery, environment, and its cleanliness. You watch over your equipment; it watches over you. Here are just a few of the many benefits of regularly getting your exhaust system's ducts cleaned to ensure hygiene as well as safety.

Fire Prevention

Vapor and grease build up inside exhaust ducts can heat the machine, and the heat slowly spreads around the entire surrounding area, and the high-in-temperature, the overheated machine can become a potentially fuel a fire. Accumulated grease and other residues in your exhaust system's duct is often flammable and a fire hazard.

By removing the dirt, grime and other flammable elements which collect over time, you may be preventing a fatal fire accident and protecting lives, property and your equipment.

Improved Indoor Air Quality/ Reduced Odors

Help fix contaminated air that may be a safety hazard for you and others in that environment. By regularly cleaning your system’s ducts you may be improving indoor air quality, reducing airborne toxins and boosting the overall atmosphere of the area.

This will also help keep unpleasant odors at bay by getting rid of dust, mildew, fungi, or moss, which often accumulate in dark, congested corners such as ventilation ducts. Regular cleaning will get rid of unpleasant smells, pollutants, and allergens, and keep your environment and equipment fresh and healthy.

Health Protection

Protect the health of you and those around you by enhancing a clean, hygienic working environment and machinery, which is free of toxic residues such as mold and mildew, which develop invents over time. Removing dust and debris from there cleanses not just the machinery but also the air around it and boosts the health of your equipment, and the atmosphere remains pollution-free.

Reduced Energy Consumption/ Air Conditioning or Heating Costs

When released from extra stress load in struggling to deliver the desired result, your system will run more smoothly and consume less energy when airflow isn’t restricted. Go easy on your pocket and your exhaust system by making sure it isn't clogged up. It is also less likely to break down, and you can save up on expensive repairs or replacements.

Long Lasting System Durability/ Better System Maintenance

Taking care of your machines is essential for their durability and boosts their overall health, functionality, and maintenance. Keeping them clean of dirt and congested grease, grime or soot helps them perform better and last longer regarding life expectancy.

Eliminate Allergens

Promote better work efficiency and prevent sickness and allergies by getting rid of air pollutants, which may cause disease breakouts. Keep your business up and running, your work going at top speed and efficient machine performance and result by doing the simple task of scheduled regular vent cleaning.

Routinely checking up on and cleaning your ducts is crucial for the smooth running of the system and health of your environment. Habitually contact experienced professionals to check your ventilation system for grease, dirt, and grime which may tamper with its operation, and cause serious possible harm to you or your workplace, it is a necessity to get your system regularly serviced to keep it running at perfect speed with perfect ease.

Now that you own a restaurant, you must have realized it's not as easy as you thought it would be. You don't get free food (you're paying for everything), you can't just open the fridge and eat all the chocolate cream you want. No. It might have killed the dream you have had since you were 9, but you have to admit owning a restaurant is fun. You must also know by now that there are still things you need to learn, always.

Out of these things, that you must learn there is one that is always neglected and never given the importance it deserves: your kitchen exhaust system.

While cooking, grease can evaporate and stick to the walls and ceiling which despite being unhygienic can cause a fire hazard. Your exhaust system prevents that from happening, and it's important to clean your exhaust system regularly.

Here are four things you should know about cleaning your kitchen exhaust system.

How Often Should You Clean It

The NFPA-96 Standard Section 11.4 states that entire exhaust system shall be inspected for grease buildup by a properly trained, qualified, and certified person(s) according to the type of food the restaurant serves. For example, Systems serving solid fuel cooking operations must clean it once a month but systems are serving low fuel cooking operations like churches can get it cleaned once a year. You can also check on your own and know when to clean it.

Install Doors

To clean the exhaust system well, you need to access all the parts. To reach these parts even the horizontal and vertical ductwork, openings or doors must be installed. These openings must be large enough to ensure thorough cleaning a minimum of every 12 feet of horizontal ductwork and on every floor of vertical ductwork. Companies often attach doors, but they're rarely big enough to get it cleaned right, so you now see why we insist that you install them on your own.

What is Clean?

You will know that a surface is clean if there is no grease is accumulated on it. For a more precise measurement purchase the Grease Gauge which is a tool developed by IKEKA, it measures fuel accumulation on a surface to see if it’s clean or not. You can also always use the old fashioned way and rub your finger against the surface to see if it gets oily or black.

Know the Right Way

Your kitchen exhaust consists of mainly three parts: the fan, the hood, and the ducts. You need to know what kind of material it is made of. If it's made of stainless steel, then you must use warm soapy water if it's vinyl or plastic try an all-purpose cleaner but you can also use soapy water, for copper buy a copper cleaner. You should also check for signs of corrosion if you're using metal. You must try to focus individually on all parts and clean them well.

For a restaurant to not shut down, it needs the approval of a health inspector, and for that, it must keep every nook and cranny clean. It might be a little difficult, but if you're on a budget, you can clean it yourself with right things.

You want to open up a restaurant, and you've been checking the requirements for your kitchen. You're afraid you're going over budget, so you start cutting costs. You look at the words "exhaust system" and think of all the trouble you will have to endure to keep it clean, but you think of how necessary it is. You think okay fine, we'll just clean it once a year or something. No. You need to stop right there.

Cleaning your kitchen exhaust is important. If it’s still something you're not sure about, then let us help you make up your mind with these 4 benefits of cleaning your kitchen exhaust.

1- Fire Hazards

You know how much oil we love to put in our food, the richer, the better. The exhaust system is supposed to stop this grease from accumulating on our walls and other places. The exhaust system, itself, is full of grease. Grease accumulation leads to kitchen fires and for you and your worker's safety, clean your kitchen exhaust. You can hire a professional exhaust cleaner, yes they have one of those (see how important it is?), and they’ll scrub it well enough for you to stay in compliance with the fire code so you can merrily run your restaurant.

2- Odor Removal

You work with cumin, you work with garlic, you work with curry. How are you still conscious and not on the floor by the fetid stench. Your hero is your exhaust system. Without your exhaust, you will find customers leaving with a hand holding their nose and your restaurant earning a bad name. You don’t want that, now do you? Of course not! You need to treat your hero by getting it cleaned when it needs to be cleaned. When you schedule regular exhaust cleanings, you and your customers will be able to enjoy fresh air although the odor cannot completely be irradiated from the kitchen it can be reduced to a significant extent.

3- The Inside Air Quality

Cooking can release harmful pollutants that affect the inside quality of your kitchen. The hood is supposed to capture the cooking fumes, but it is unable to do so when grease has clogged it. Research has proven that while cooking with gas or electricity, pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide can be released and these pollutants are either inhaled by the employees in the kitchen or go in the food to be served if the exhaust system is not clean. This can cause diseases like lung cancer. So it is up to you to decide whether spending some bucks on the maintenance of your exhaust system is worth everyone’s health.

4- Easy on the Pocket

A clean kitchen exhaust system results in smoother air flow. The effectiveness of the system improves your efficiency that is, it does not waste energy. The production rate will also increase while your bills, in the long run, might not. Now you might be able to save up for that renovation you have been thinking of.

You cannot have doubts about this now. Call up a professional exhaust cleaner and avail all these benefits! You can even help others who are going through the same dilemma as you. Share your knowledge! Run! Go!

The kitchen in your restaurant is the king's room, it must be looked after, cleaned, and make anyone who sees it go 'wow.' Just like a king, his room needs high maintenance. If your kitchen isn’t spotless, the customers are sure to raise questions and eventually you will lose them if the health inspector doesn’t catch you before. The ventilation system is an integral part of your restaurant kitchen and cleaning it can be tiresome, but you have to do it.

What Does the Ventilation System do?

The ventilation system is supposed to maintain a fresh balance air and the one that is taken away. It offers built-in fire suppression abilities to keep the workspace, and everyone in it safe ventilating a commercial kitchen can be very complicated. Air must move through ductwork swiftly and effectively.

The Battle with Space

The equipment must be arranged in such a way that it does not take a lot of space since, in a commercial kitchen, space is already a struggle; you need different working stations, a place to store clean dishes a place to set the orders and a place for the workers to move around without bumping into one another.

A kitchen exhaust system is supposed to take away contaminates in the air by pulling them out through an exhaust fan. As soon as the contaminates are removed, fresh air from the outside comes inside.

When to Clean the Hood

The significant parts of a ventilation system include a fan, an exhaust hood, and ductwork. To prevent your kitchen from catching fire because of grease, you must make sure that you clean your kitchen hood exhaust system to fire code standards regularly.

To satisfy your insurance company, health departments, fire inspectors, your exhaust system must be consistently inspected and cleaned. The amount of cleaning required varies with some factors for example how much your restaurant is in use.

If you're a big restaurant that gets hundreds of customers a day then, yes, you are required to clean your oven hood more often than a less busy one. But it also depends on the type of food you serve, for example, a fast food restaurant will need to clean its exhaust hood more than a Chinese restaurant just like a barbeque restaurant would clean its exhaust more often than a Thai food restaurant.

It also depends on the type of stove you use; If you’re working on charcoal-burning stoves or wood-burning, you should have to clean every month, or you should also clean every two weeks.

Here are some examples of how often you should try cleaning depending on certain factors:

• Average restaurants – 90-day cleaning requirement
• Fast food restaurants – 30-day cleaning requirement
• Oven hoods – 180-day cleaning requirement
• Hoods over non-greasy appliances – 1-year cleaning requirement

Clean it Right

You must also know the right way to clean your exhaust hood; if it's made of stainless steel, then you must use warm soapy water if it's vinyl or plastic try an all-purpose cleaner, but you can also use soapy water, for copper hoods buy a copper cleaner. And remember, cleaning the outside is almost as important as the inside for a clean kitchen and will raise worker motivation.

Now that you know all there is to know about your exhaust hood grab your cleaning appliances and go, go, go!