Guide - TR19 Grease - UK-Wide
Restaurant, banqueting, bar and room service - a hotel runs several cooklines, often on shared ductwork. Here is how to clean them on the right intervals, overnight, while the hotel stays open.
The short answer
A hotel is rarely a single kitchen. There is usually a main restaurant, a banqueting or events kitchen, a bar or lounge servery, room-service prep and sometimes a cafe - each with its own grease load, often feeding shared ductwork and risers through the building. Cleaning a hotel means mapping the outlets and scheduling them around a site that never fully closes:
The fire-safety duty sits with one responsible person, but the work is several jobs, planned together.
Mapping the outlets
The first step in a hotel is to stop treating the extract system as one thing. Each outlet loads differently:
Setting a single blanket interval across all of them either over-cleans the light outlets or leaves the heavy ones overdue. A survey reads each system and gives each its own measured frequency.
Shared ductwork
In many hotels the outlets do not have wholly independent systems - they share risers, plant or a common route to roof-mounted fans. That connection is exactly why a whole-system view matters: grease anywhere in shared ductwork is a fuel path that can carry a fire between parts of the building, and a clean that does one outlet's canopy while ignoring the shared run it feeds has not controlled the risk.
It also shapes the schedule. Because the hotel keeps trading - guests in rooms, a bar open late, breakfast early - the work is done outlet by outlet, overnight, so each kitchen is cleaned and back before its next service while the rest of the hotel carries on. A good plan sequences the outlets across a few nights rather than trying to take the whole operation down at once.
Why it matters
For the responsible person, the value of treating the hotel as a coordinated programme rather than a series of ad-hoc cleans is a single, coherent compliance picture: every outlet on a measured interval, the shared ductwork accounted for, and one set of certificates that a fire risk assessor, an insurer or a brand auditor can read at a glance. The alternative - different contractors cleaning different outlets on different cycles, with the shared runs falling between them - is how a large building ends up with a greasy riser nobody owns.
The workable approach is to survey the whole site, set each outlet's interval from its real load, sequence the cleans overnight across the estate of kitchens, and keep one documented schedule. The hotel stays open, the system stays inside safe limits, and the paperwork tells one clear story.
Questions
No. A blanket interval either over-cleans the light outlets or leaves the heavy ones overdue. The main restaurant, banqueting, bar and room-service kitchens each carry a different grease load, so each should be surveyed and given its own measured interval.
Because its load is spiky. A banqueting kitchen can sit quiet then cater hundreds of covers for one event, putting down a lot of grease in a single weekend. Its interval has to reflect the busy days rather than the quiet average, or the system is overdue right after a big function.
Then the system is one connected fire path and has to be cleaned as a whole. Grease in a shared riser can carry a fire between parts of the building, so a clean that does one canopy while ignoring the shared run it feeds has not controlled the risk.
Yes. We sequence the work outlet by outlet, overnight, so each kitchen is cleaned and back before its next service while the rest of the hotel keeps trading. Larger sites are spread across a few nights rather than taken down at once.
Yes. Treating the hotel as one coordinated programme gives you a single, coherent set of certificates - every outlet on a measured interval and the shared ductwork accounted for - that a fire risk assessor, insurer or brand auditor can read at a glance.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
We survey every outlet, set each its own TR19 interval and clean overnight across the site, shared risers included, with one set of certificates. No-obligation quote, UK-wide.