Phoenix Journal · Kitchens
The decisions you make on the drawings - duct routes, access panels, canopy sizing - decide how cheap or how painful the next ten years of compliance will be. Here is how to get them right.
Fit-out planning
The choices you lock in during a fit-out - where the ductwork runs, how the canopy is sized, whether a technician can actually reach the grease - decide how cheap and how painful the next ten years of compliance will be.
Most kitchens are designed to open, not to be maintained. The extract system looks tidy on handover day, then the first deep clean reveals sealed ductwork, blind bends and a fan nobody can get to. Future-proofing is simply the habit of asking, at the drawing stage, three questions - can it be cleaned, can it be proved compliant, and can it cope with how we might cook in five years. Get those right and you protect your insurance, your fire risk position and your ability to change the menu without ripping out steel.
Build it in early
Why it pays back
Every one of those checklist items exists because grease is the problem that never stops. It leaves the pan as vapour, cools on the way up the duct and lays down a flammable film on the inside of the steel. If a flare-up on the range finds its way into the extract, that film is the fuse that carries fire across the building. TR19® Grease is the industry response to exactly this - it is the recognised specification for managing the fire risk from grease build-up, and it is what insurers and fire risk assessors now expect to see evidenced.
That is the commercial sting. TR19® Grease is not, in itself, a law - but the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 places a duty on you to manage fire risk, and most commercial policies now treat a documented cleaning regime as a condition of cover. If a fire starts in a duct you cannot prove was cleaned, an insurer can decline the claim. A system that was built to be accessed and certified turns that risk into a routine invoice. A sealed one turns it into an argument you have after the worst has already happened.
How often you clean is driven by how hard you cook, not by the calendar alone. The common frameworks point to heavy use of 12 to 16 hours a day warranting a clean roughly every three months, moderate use of 6 to 12 hours around every six months, and light use of 2 to 6 hours about once a year - always subject to your own fire risk assessment. Notice what that means at the fit-out stage - a kitchen you expect to run flat out needs its access designed for four visits a year, every year. Panels in the wrong place do not just slow one clean, they tax every single one for the life of the building.
Future-proofing also means being honest about where UK kitchens are heading. The direction of travel is electrification and lower CO₂ - more induction, tighter energy performance, and pressure on gas connections in new commercial premises. That is a genuine design fork, and it is worth resolving early rather than regretting. If you are weighing up the heat source itself, our guide on how to choose between gas and induction in a new fit-out walks through the extract, power and running-cost trade-offs. Induction changes the fume load and the canopy duty, so it belongs in the ventilation conversation, not after it.
None of this has to blow the budget, but it does need to be costed deliberately - spare capacity, extra access panels and proper filtration are cheaper as lines on the original order than as retrofits into a live kitchen. If you are pricing the whole project, our breakdown of the cost of a kitchen fit-out, realistically sets out where the money genuinely goes so the maintainable choices survive the value-engineering meeting. The cheapest extract system on the quote is almost always the most expensive one to own.
The test of a future-proofed fit-out is simple. On the day your first deep clean is due, a technician should be able to open the system, reach every surface, bring the grease film back under the threshold and hand you a certificate your insurer will accept - without a single unplanned bill. That outcome is designed in months earlier, on the drawings, by people who thought about the tenth clean as carefully as the opening night.
Questions
It means designing the ductwork, canopy and fan so they can still be cleaned, tested and certified years after handover, and so they can cope with changes to your menu or heat source. In practice that is plenty of correctly placed access panels, spare extract capacity, and the compliance paperwork set up from day one. The aim is that your tenth deep clean is as painless as your first.
Guidance under TR19 Grease points to access panels at roughly every 2 metres of run, plus one at every bend, junction, fan and in-line component, so no internal surface is left blind. Each panel must be large enough for a technician to reach and clean the full internal face. Panels in the wrong place, or too small to work through, will slow and inflate every clean for the life of the kitchen.
Frequency follows how hard you cook, confirmed by your fire risk assessment. Heavy use of 12 to 16 hours a day typically warrants a clean around every three months, moderate use of 6 to 12 hours about every six months, and light use of 2 to 6 hours roughly once a year. A busy kitchen therefore needs its access designed for several visits a year, every year.
TR19 Grease is a specification rather than a law, but it is closely tied to legal duties. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires you to manage fire risk, and most commercial insurers now treat a documented TR19 Grease cleaning regime as a condition of cover. If a duct fire occurs and you cannot prove the system was cleaned to standard, a claim can be refused.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Great equipment still needs a clean kitchen around it. Phoenix deep-cleans commercial kitchens to the standard an inspection scores - UK-wide, around your service.