Phoenix Journal · Ductwork
The cheapest quote and a glossy certificate are not the same as a compliant clean. Here is how to choose a kitchen extract cleaning company that actually protects your kitchen, your cover and your people.
A cautionary tale
The certificate was framed on the office wall, dated four months earlier, and it did not save them.
Picture a busy site kitchen running two shifts a day. The kitchen manager had done the responsible thing, or so it seemed. A contractor had been in, quoted keenly, cleaned the canopy and the visible run of duct, handed over a smart-looking certificate and left. Everyone moved on. Then a fan bearing overheated late one evening, a smoulder in the ductwork caught, and a small fire ran further up the extract than anyone expected.
The building was fine in the end. The insurance claim was not. When the loss adjuster asked for evidence that the whole extract system had been cleaned to standard, the paperwork fell apart. The certificate covered the canopy and the first few metres of accessible duct. The long horizontal run above the ceiling, where the grease had actually built up, had never been opened. There were no access panels to open it with, no before-and-after photographs, no grease-depth readings, and no schematic showing what had and had not been reached. The clean looked done. It was not.
This is the trap that a poor choice of contractor sets for you, and it is quietly common. Choosing a kitchen extract cleaning company is not about finding someone to make the canopy shine. It is about buying evidence that stands up when something goes wrong. Get that decision right and the rest follows.
The post-mortem
Nothing in that story was bad luck. Every failure traced back to how the contractor was chosen, and each one is avoidable.
The cleaning body of record in the UK is BESA, the Building Engineering Services Association, and its specification for this work is TR19® Grease. That document sets out how a grease extract system should be inspected, cleaned and verified. The kitchen above was measured against it after the fire and missed on almost every count. Here is where it came apart.
Put together, these were not five separate problems. They were one decision, made on headline price alone, playing out five different ways.
The numbers that matter
The good news is that a strong contractor is not hard to spot once you know what to ask for. Frequency is a useful starting anchor: heavy-use kitchens running roughly 12 to 16 hours a day are generally cleaned every 3 months, moderate use of 6 to 12 hours every 6 months, and light use of 2 to 6 hours every 12 months. Your insurer may set a shorter interval, and a good company will read your policy rather than guess. Work through the checklist below before you sign anything.
It helps to remember why any of this matters beyond the visit itself. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the responsible person for the premises has a legal duty to manage fire risk, and a grease-laden extract system is a well-understood fire route. When an insurer assesses cover, or a loss adjuster examines a claim, they do not stand in your kitchen and admire the canopy. They read the report. A Post-Clean Verification Report with photographs, readings and an honest schematic is the thing that turns a clean into proof, and proof into a claim that pays. That is what you are really buying, and it is why the cheapest quote so often turns out to be the most expensive.
So when you choose a kitchen extract cleaning company, choose the one that leads with evidence. The firm that measures, documents and tells you plainly what it could and could not reach is protecting you, even when the news is a little inconvenient. The firm that only ever tells you the job is done is protecting itself.
Questions
Look for the BESA Grease Hygiene Technician (GHT) qualification, which shows the person cleaning and signing off your system has been trained in the TR19 Grease standard, the safety procedures and the verification methods. Also ask whether the company does the work itself or subcontracts it, because you want the qualified people actually on site. A firm that cannot tell you who is doing the work, or what they are trained to, is a firm to avoid.
Ask for a full Post-Clean Verification Report rather than a one-page certificate. It should include before-and-after photographs, grease-depth readings taken by deposit thickness testing (DTT) or wet film thickness testing (WFTT), and a schematic that marks the access points and any sections that could not be reached, with recommendations. If the report states clearly that the whole system was cleaned and backs it with evidence, you have proof; if it is vague about scope, treat that as a warning.
Frequency depends on how hard the kitchen works. As a general guide under TR19 Grease, heavy use of around 12 to 16 hours a day is cleaned every 3 months, moderate use of 6 to 12 hours every 6 months, and light use of 2 to 6 hours every 12 months. Your insurance policy may require a shorter interval, so a good contractor will check your cover rather than assume, and set the schedule to your real cooking hours and menu.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix surveys and cleans kitchen and building ductwork to the TR19 standard - measured, cleaned and certificated, UK-wide.