Phoenix Journal · Ductwork
Missed extract cleans rarely start with the clean - they start with a forgotten reminder. Here is how to automate planned maintenance so TR19 intervals, certificates and evidence look after themselves.
Planned maintenance
The clean itself is rarely the thing that gets missed - it is the reminder that fails, and with it the certificate, the audit trail and, in the worst case, the insurance cover behind them.
Every commercial kitchen already knows extract cleaning has to happen. What quietly goes wrong is the scheduling: a job that should have been booked three months ago slips to five, a duct clean that fell due while the manager was on leave never gets raised, and the paperwork that should sit ready for the fire risk assessor is a spreadsheet nobody has opened since spring. Automating your planned maintenance reminders is the unglamorous fix that stops all of that - it turns compliance from something you have to remember into something that arrives in your inbox, dated and evidenced, before the deadline rather than after it.
This is not about buying the biggest facilities platform on the market. It is about building a reminder system that reflects how your kitchens actually run, ties each task to a real standard, and keeps the records an insurer or enforcing officer will ask for. Get that right and the difference is measurable - fewer overdue tasks, cleaner audits, and no scramble the week before a policy renewal.
Most kitchen operators start with the best intentions and a wall planner or a shared calendar. The trouble is that a manual reminder depends entirely on the person who set it still being in the role, still watching the date, and still free to act on the day it lands. Staff turnover, holiday cover and a busy service between them account for the majority of missed cleans we see. The task did not become unnecessary - the memory of it simply left the building.
There is a second, subtler problem. A calendar entry that just says "duct clean due" carries no context. It does not tell the next manager which standard applies, how the frequency was decided, or what evidence the last visit produced. So even when the reminder fires, the response is often a guess. Kitchen extract cleaning in the UK is governed by BESA’s TR19® Grease specification, and that standard sets minimum cleaning frequencies by how hard the kitchen works - roughly every three months for heavy use of twelve to sixteen hours a day, every six months for moderate use of six to twelve hours, and every twelve months for light use of two to six hours. A reminder that does not encode which band a given site sits in is only doing half the job.
The consequences are not merely administrative. Insurers increasingly write TR19® compliance into policy conditions, and a claim after a kitchen fire can be challenged if you cannot produce a valid certificate and post-clean verification report for the affected system. A missed reminder, in other words, is not a tidy-up problem - it is a coverage problem. That is precisely why the reminder deserves to be automated rather than left to willpower.
Set your frequencies to the standard
Before you automate anything, the schedule has to be right. These are the TR19® Grease minimum frequencies that your automated reminders should be built around, adjusted upward where cooking type, system condition or a deposit thickness test says a site needs it sooner.
Treat those figures as the floor, not the target. A busy chargrill or wok station lays down grease far faster than the hours alone suggest, so the honest approach is to set the reminder to the standard interval and let a deposit thickness test pull it forward when the evidence demands. Automating the reminder does not remove that judgement - it simply guarantees the judgement gets made on time, every time, instead of whenever someone happens to remember.
A reminder system worth relying on has four moving parts, and none of them is complicated. First, an asset register: a simple list of every extract system, canopy and duct run you are responsible for, each tagged with its usage band and its due frequency. Second, a scheduler that reads that register and raises the next task automatically the moment the last one is signed off, so the clock resets itself rather than waiting for a human to re-enter a date. Third, escalation - if a task passes its due date without action, the reminder should nag upward to a second name, not sit unread in one inbox. Fourth, and most overlooked, an evidence trail: each completed task should attach its TR19® certificate, the post-clean verification report and before-and-after photographs, so the record builds itself as the work happens.
You can assemble this in a general calendar tool if you are small, but most UK operators managing several sites move to a CAFM or PPM platform. The advantage is not the software for its own sake - it is that these systems can be driven by SFG20, the industry-standard maintenance specification, which is updated roughly monthly and colour-codes tasks by whether they are statutory, compliance-critical or discretionary. That distinction matters when budgets are tight, because it tells you at a glance which reminders you can never let slide. If you are weighing up how formal to make all this, it is worth understanding what planned preventive maintenance actually involves before you commit to a platform, so the tool fits the regime rather than the other way round.
The principle scales well beyond the kitchen. The same reminder logic - register, auto-reschedule, escalate, evidence - applies to LEV testing, fire damper drops, filter changes and every other recurring obligation on the site. Kitchen extract is simply the one where the stakes of forgetting are highest, which makes it the natural place to prove the system before you extend it across your wider planned preventive maintenance for building services. Start narrow, get the extract schedule watertight, then widen the net.
One last discipline makes the whole thing durable: review the automation itself on a fixed cadence. Usage bands drift as menus change, sites open and close, and a kitchen that ran six hours a day last year may be running twelve now. A reminder set to the wrong frequency is worse than no reminder, because it breeds false confidence. Put a standing annual check in the diary to confirm every asset is still on the right interval, and let the system carry the rest.
Questions
Build a simple asset register listing every extract system with its TR19 usage band, then use a scheduler that auto-raises the next task the moment the last one is signed off. Most multi-site UK operators use a CAFM or PPM platform driven by SFG20 so the frequencies stay aligned to the standard. The key is that each completed task attaches its certificate and verification report, so the evidence trail builds itself.
BESA's TR19 Grease specification sets minimum frequencies by usage: roughly every three months for heavy use of twelve to sixteen hours a day, every six months for moderate use of six to twelve hours, and every twelve months for light use of two to six hours. These are minimums, not targets. Heavy grease-producing cooking or a deposit thickness test can justify cleaning more often, so your reminders should encode the band and be pulled forward when evidence demands.
Yes. Many UK insurers now write TR19 compliance into policy conditions, and a claim after a kitchen fire can be challenged if you cannot produce a valid certificate and post-clean verification report for the affected system. A missed reminder that lets a clean lapse is therefore a coverage risk, not just an administrative one. Keeping automated, dated records is the simplest way to protect the cover behind them.
A shared calendar can work for a single site, but it depends on one person remembering to act and carries no context about which standard or frequency applies. Once you manage several sites or want tasks to auto-reschedule and escalate when overdue, a CAFM or PPM system pays for itself. The real benefit is being able to drive schedules from SFG20 and hold the evidence in one place for audits and renewals.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix surveys and cleans kitchen and building ductwork to the TR19 standard - measured, cleaned and certificated, UK-wide.