Neglecting to clean kitchen hood systems can be very dangerous and costly ground to walk on, whether in your home or business. Components like exhaust fans, filters, ducts, and hoods all need to be preserved and cleaned in order to avoid liabilities, as well as, costly appliance replacement.

For commercial kitchen and venues, it is actually required by law to have kitchen hood systems cleaned on a routine basis. Although not required by law, it is equally important for residential kitchen hood systems to be cleaned on a routine basis. This is to avoid potential hazards and liabilities, such as broken equipment, lingering odors, and kitchen grease fires.

Grease Fires and Hazards

Grease is a common facilitator for kitchen fires, especially for restaurants that cook with a lot of oil. It builds up and accumulates in the system’s ducts and hoods, and begins to act as fuel for fire. Exhaust systems with built-in fire suppression systems do exist on the market, and come highly recommended for high volume kitchens. But even with innovative technologies like these, there is still room for such hazards, so it is still crucial to regularly clean kitchen hood and kitchen exhausts.

Factors to Consider

If you can’t decide how frequent you should have your kitchen hood system cleaned, think about the amount of volume being produced in your kitchen. This will differ greatly between restaurants and food venues, and residential homes. If your kitchen is very busy, and cooks a lot of food, then you should expect to maintenance your kitchen exhausts and ducts more often. Residential homes may only need to have their systems cleaned annually.

Furthermore, think about the type of food frequently being cooked in your kitchen. For instance, venues like bars and pubs generally serve quickly prepared foods like deep-fried appetizers and entrees. This type of menu involves a lot of grease cooking, which will encourage a higher accumulation of grease particles in ducts and exhausts, thus resulting in the need for more frequent cleaning.

Recommended Cleaning Schedules

You might wonder what exactly constitutes “frequent” cleaning. To be more precise, it is recommended to clean a kitchen hood system once every six months or so. For homes, kitchen hood cleaning can schedule once per year, or even every other year. If you are a bar owner or a restaurant that cooks a large amount of oils and grease, then the kitchen exhaust, ducts, fans, and filters all need cleaned at least once a month, every month.

What to Do With an Old Kitchen Hood System

Just because your kitchen hood system has been engulfed in grease, or has fallen victim to a grease fire, you can still make good use of it. Various scrap metal recycling centers accept old or broken appliances, including kitchen hood systems. Not only will most of them pick it up and haul it away for you for free, many will even pay you cash in return. Broken appliances still retain valuable metals that can be reprocessed into new scrap metal. This makes them valuable to enterprises like the scrap metal industry. So don’t get down if your kitchen hood system take a turn for the worst, or cooks its last meal; a local and reputable Indianapolis scrap metal recycling company will take it off your hands and pay you cash on the spot.

Who to Trust for Appliance Recycling

Call Garden City Iron & Metal at 1-888-586-5322 to recycle scrap metal and junk metal commodities in Central and Southern Indiana. We pay cash on the spot for both ferrous and non-ferrous metals, as well as, junk cars, automotive parts, appliances, construction equipment, motorized farming equipment, and much more!