Insight from the team
Cleaning your commercial kitchen extract system is a legal and insurance duty. Here is why grease matters and how often to clean under TR19 Grease.
For a commercial kitchen with an extract system, keeping the ductwork clean is not optional. It is the property owner’s and landlord’s responsibility, it is a condition of most insurance policies, and it is central to fire safety.
For commercial kitchens with kitchen extract systems, it is the property owner’s and landlord’s responsibility to ensure the extraction system is correctly cleaned and maintained. That duty does not pass to your tenants or your kitchen staff, and failure to comply is a serious matter with legal consequences.
Over time, grease deposits build up inside your canopy, filters and ventilation extraction system, and this becomes a major fire risk. Cooking oils ignite easily, and a fire on the hob can quickly spread into, or be drawn up through, the extract system. Once grease has been allowed to accumulate within the ductwork, it becomes the perfect fuel and can carry a fire through the entire length of the system.
Insurers typically insist that all canopies, cooker hoods, filters and grease traps are cleaned weekly, with a record kept for insurance inspections. If you do not clean your internal ductwork regularly, you are at a greater risk of a ducting fire, and you risk invalidating your cover.
These recommendations come from BESA’s TR19 Grease: Fire Risk Management of Grease Accumulation within Kitchen Extraction Systems. Although the guidance is not itself legislation, it is the recognised standard of good practice, and it sets out how often each kitchen should be cleaned.
The right frequency differs for every premises. It depends on:
You will need a qualified cleaning company with specially trained operatives who clean the full length of every flue and duct, including the motors and fans, which should be cleaned at least every six months.
Using BESA’s guidance, we recommend the following frequencies:
Clean Ducts trains every operative to the BESA TR19 standard, so that cleaning hatches are installed correctly and safely within your ductwork and your kitchen stays compliant. We supply all the certificates and reports you need for when your insurer asks for them.
We are a BESCA Vent Hygiene Associate member. Under the scheme we self-certify our specialist hygiene cleaning to the required TR19 specification, and our work is independently spot-checked to confirm we are cleaning to TR19 standards. That gives you confidence that the systems we clean are done properly, are fire safe and are compliant for insurance purposes. On completion you receive a TR19 certificate for your records.
If you have a commercial kitchen with an extract system, or an air ventilation system that needs cleaning and disinfecting, arrange a survey and we will assess what your building needs.
Book a free survey and a named engineer comes back within 24 hours.