Phoenix Journal · Ductwork
Most cleaning disputes never begin with the cleaning - they begin with a term nobody thought to write down. Here is what belongs in the contract before anyone lifts an access panel.
Contracts & compliance
Most disagreements on a cleaning job do not start with the cleaning. They start with a sentence that was never written down.
When you bring in a contractor to clean an extract system, a canopy or a full kitchen, you are buying two things at once - the work itself, and the proof that the work was done to a recognised standard. If either one is vague, you carry the risk. Was the whole duct run in scope, or only the reachable parts? Who is liable if a fixing snaps or a ceiling tile cracks on the way to a hidden section? What happens if your insurer asks for evidence six months later and all you have is an invoice? Good contract terms answer those questions before they turn into arguments.
You do not need to be a lawyer to protect yourself. You need to know which handful of terms carry the weight, what each one is actually doing, and where the standards and the law sit behind them. The rest of this page walks through exactly that, from the point of view of the person signing the job off - which, in a commercial kitchen, is almost always you.
A quote is not a contract. A quote tells you a price; a contract tells you what you are getting for it, what happens when something goes wrong, and how you prove the job was done. On a kitchen cleaning job the terms that genuinely protect you cluster into a short list, and each one closes off a specific way the job can hurt you later.
None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary spine of a commercial service agreement, and reputable contractors will already have most of it drafted. Your job is to read it, and to notice what is missing.
Picture the three most common ways a kitchen cleaning job sours, and you will see that every one of them is really a contract failure wearing a different coat.
The first is the half-cleaned system. A contractor cleans the canopy and the first easy stretch of duct, issues a certificate, and moves on. Months later a fire investigator or an insurer looks at the horizontal runs above the ceiling and finds them thick with grease. The standard here is unambiguous - the sector guidance, now published as TR19 Grease by the Building Engineering Services Association, expects the whole system to be brought below a grease deposit of 200 microns, verified by a deposit thickness test or a wet film thickness test. A scope clause that names the full run, and a certificate that reports readings against that 200-micron threshold, is what turns a partial clean into a provable one.
The second is the damage dispute. Someone lifts a ceiling tile to reach a duct, a fixing gives way, and a light fitting comes down with it. Without a reinstatement clause and a clear liability position, you are now negotiating from scratch while the kitchen sits idle. With them, responsibility was settled before the tile was ever touched, and the contractor's insurance is the backstop rather than your own.
The third is the missing evidence. This is the quiet one, and often the most expensive. Insurers increasingly make regular extract cleaning a condition of cover, and if a fire spreads through a neglected duct with no valid certificate to hand, a claim can be challenged or refused. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 the legal duty sits with you as the responsible person, not with the contractor. A contract that specifies exactly what documentation you receive - a hygiene certificate naming the technician, the date and the location, before-and-after photographs taken from matched positions, test readings, and a note of any area that could not be accessed - is the difference between holding proof and hoping you remember who did the work.
It helps to treat the certificate as a deliverable in its own right, written into the contract alongside the price. A proper post-clean report is not a compliment slip. It records what was cleaned, to what standard, with photographic evidence from fixed reference points and measured grease readings against the 200-micron limit. Where a section could not be reached, it says so plainly, which protects you by making the gap visible rather than pretending the system is spotless end to end. Many contractors also lodge the certificate on the Ventilation Hygiene Register, giving you an independent record you can produce for an insurer or an enforcing authority without digging through old emails.
Tie the certificate to a sensible cleaning frequency and you have a genuinely defensible position. The guidance ties frequency to how hard the kitchen works - roughly every twelve months for light use of two to six hours a day, every six months for six to twelve hours, and every three months for heavy use beyond twelve hours a day. Put that interval in the contract and the next clean is scheduled by agreement, not by whoever happens to remember. The same discipline that protects your extract system applies to the rest of the space, which is why a well-drafted commercial kitchen deep clean should define its own scope, standard and sign-off just as carefully.
Read this way, contract terms stop being legal boilerplate and start being what they really are - the map of who is responsible for what, and the receipt that proves the job was done. Get those two things right and almost every dispute you were ever likely to have simply never happens.
Questions
The scope of works. It should name every system being cleaned and the full extent of each, including the complete duct run to the fan and discharge point rather than only the accessible sections. A tightly written scope is what prevents the common dispute where part of the system is left uncleaned because both sides assumed different things were included.
Ask to see evidence of public liability cover, which is commonly between five and ten million pounds for extract and duct work, and employers' liability cover, which UK law sets at a legal minimum of five million pounds where the contractor has staff. It is reasonable to have current certificates confirmed in writing before work starts, and a good contract will also cap liability and exclude pre-existing damage.
Insurers increasingly make regular extract cleaning a condition of cover, and under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 the legal duty sits with you as the responsible person. If a fire spreads through a neglected duct and you have no valid certificate reporting grease levels against the 200-micron standard, a claim can be challenged. The certificate is your proof the work was done, so treat it as a contract deliverable, not an extra.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix surveys and cleans kitchen and building ductwork to the TR19 standard - measured, cleaned and certificated, UK-wide.