Cleanliness is next to orderliness.
This famous quote also applies to your kitchen exhaust duct, especially if you run a restaurant where a tidy cooking area is required. You can achieve many things with a clean vent—operate your business accordingly, maintain a healthy environment, and serve quality foods.
But, other than these, there are four more critical reasons why you should consider getting your exhaust ducts cleaned regularly. Furthermore, we’ll share in this blog post why experts recommend hiring a professional to address the dirt, grease, or debris issues than having yourself or your employees clean it alone.
How can kitchen exhaust and duct cleaning benefit you and your restaurant business?
1. Improve the establishment’s air quality
Grimy exhaust ducts have a huge potential to affect the air quality surrounding your diner. With that likelihood, you can expect to inhale unhealthy air filled with harmful bacteria, especially if you have been neglecting to clean these kitchen facilities for a long time already.
This possibility is a major red flag, specifically for restaurant owners who aim to impress and gain loyal customers who will patronize their business. Hence, you should make it a routine to schedule a cleaning and maintenance time for your kitchen exhausts and ducts if you wish to ensure a healthy working environment for your employees and clean eating and chatting surroundings for your customers.
2. Experience better air circulation inside the restaurant
One sign that your kitchen exhaust badly needs cleansing is if your space suffers from poor air circulation, wherein bad smell and smoke are infiltrating your entire restaurant establishment. With these dangerous indications, you should make time and get your ducts cleaned as soon as possible if you still want to save the service quality of your business.
Your exhausts and ducts are the utilities assigned to collect all the airborne cooking byproducts, like grease, fumes, spices, steam, heat, and smoke. Hence, skipping cleaning means that this harmful debris has the chance to crawl back inside your cooking area. Have your kitchen ducts cleaned, so you can enjoy excellent air circulation providing a better ambiance inside your diner.
3. Boost the fan motor’s lifespan
If you maintain the cleanliness of your kitchen exhaust and duct, you can prevent your fan motor from working extra hard to keep the cool temperature in rooms and remove the heat from cooking food. By avoiding overworking and burning out your fan motor, you can extend and maximize the lifespan of the utility. Keeping it tidy and functional saves you from expensive damage repairs and quick replacements.
4. Prevent fire accidents
Lastly, the most critical reason for maintaining the cleanliness around your exhaust and duct is to ward off fire instances. Various debris from food cooking will likely build up into fire hazard elements and cause a massive fire.
Thus, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) made kitchen duct cleaning a mandate, particularly for restaurant businesses, under the NFPA 96 standard. Moreover, it specified that trained, qualified, and certified specialists must do the proper cleaning.
If you think cleaning your kitchen’s ducts is like sanitizing your other home appliances, think again. There are plenty of reasons why you should rely on professionals for cleansing your hoods and exhausts. But before you hire someone, you should provide convenient and safe access for them through grease duct access panels, as hard-to-reach areas are pretty challenging to handle.
Here are five essential cleaning specialists’ characteristics that can encourage you to hire one:
- Trained and experienced: cleaning specialists undergo rigorous training to familiarize themselves with the correct and safe way of sanitizing your kitchen hoods. More importantly, they know how to make your exhaust and ducts run like new ones, which regular restaurant employees have yet to learn.
- Task knowledgeable: Letting a professional clean your ducts means that they fully know what they’re doing and what they will do in case a circumstance occurs. They learn proper techniques and specific products to address the tidying needs of your kitchen ducts and exhausts.
- Carries the appropriate equipment: Remember that your hoods are delicate facilities, and if you utilize improper tools, you can unknowingly affect their function and lasting value. Therefore, it’s best to trust the experts when cleaning your ducts, as they know and possess the proper equipment that they can use for a specific sanitizing concern.
- Strictly follows precise cleaning process: A cleaning expert goes through a strict step-by-step process whenever cleansing the exhaust. First, they will inspect your kitchen duct to decide on the appropriate cleaning method before cleaning the necessary parts. Afterward, they’ll test the duct system and ensure all is well.
- Perform and finish the job efficiently: If you trust a professional to clean your kitchen hoods, you’re guaranteed fast and efficient task performance. These individuals are trained and knowledgeable, so you should expect them to move swiftly and finish the task in no time. As long as they have easy and safe entry points to your ducts, the experts can sanitize your exhaust system and make it functional within a few hours.
Make cleaning a habit
As soon as you start a restaurant business, it would be best to practice cleaning your kitchen exhausts and ducts frequently. This way, you and your team will never tolerate lame forgetting and neglecting excuses that can risk the employees, customers, and the entire establishment’s safety. Well-ventilated diners serving good food and a healthy environment should be your top priority.
