Certified or not, in business longer than anyone or just starting out. Be wary of claims of the "best service in town", if your company isn't offering you date stamped photos after the service, chances are you are getting robbed.
The areas that kitchen exhaust cleaning companies service are not visible during normal operations. The only way to know if the cleaning was done properly is by visual inspection or date stamped photos.
Take a look at this restaurant kitchen exhaust system that was recently cleaned by a "certified kitchen exhaust cleaner".
This is one of the hoods that was done. It looks pretty good from the ground.
This is a photo looking up the duct and you can see that the heavy grease was definitely scraped out, but I wouldn't call it clean.
This is looking down the horizontal duct. You can see on the left hand side of the duct that they scraped a little bit out and called this duct a done.
Here is an access port for the duct. These are designed in to your hood system to clean out areas that can not be reached from the kitchen.
Unfortunately most kitchen exhaust cleaners do not have the right tools to get the ducts clean from these access ports. Look at what was scraped from here. He probably used a putty knife to get that off and couldn't get the rest of it clean.
Here is another clean out port on the duct. This one was completely missed.
This is what the duct looked like leading away from that clean out port.
This is the flue. Looks like they used their fancy new magnetic scraper here and steam cleaned it, the only problem is they didn't get it clean.
And last but not least, the fan.
It's up to you. You can chose to trust your company because they have been around forever, they talk such a good game or they are certified by some kitchen exhaust cleaning association that they must be doing a good job. Or you can be proactive about the fire safety of your restaurant and demand DATE STAMPED photos of every service.
A lot of kitchen exhaust cleaners can talk the talk, very few can walk the walk.
The areas that kitchen exhaust cleaning companies service are not visible during normal operations. The only way to know if the cleaning was done properly is by visual inspection or date stamped photos.
Take a look at this restaurant kitchen exhaust system that was recently cleaned by a "certified kitchen exhaust cleaner".
This is one of the hoods that was done. It looks pretty good from the ground.
This is a photo looking up the duct and you can see that the heavy grease was definitely scraped out, but I wouldn't call it clean.
This is looking down the horizontal duct. You can see on the left hand side of the duct that they scraped a little bit out and called this duct a done.
Here is an access port for the duct. These are designed in to your hood system to clean out areas that can not be reached from the kitchen.
Unfortunately most kitchen exhaust cleaners do not have the right tools to get the ducts clean from these access ports. Look at what was scraped from here. He probably used a putty knife to get that off and couldn't get the rest of it clean.
Here is another clean out port on the duct. This one was completely missed.
This is what the duct looked like leading away from that clean out port.
This is the flue. Looks like they used their fancy new magnetic scraper here and steam cleaned it, the only problem is they didn't get it clean.
And last but not least, the fan.
It's up to you. You can chose to trust your company because they have been around forever, they talk such a good game or they are certified by some kitchen exhaust cleaning association that they must be doing a good job. Or you can be proactive about the fire safety of your restaurant and demand DATE STAMPED photos of every service.
A lot of kitchen exhaust cleaners can talk the talk, very few can walk the walk.
