Reliability & margins
The repair invoice is the smallest number in the story. The covers, wages, stock and goodwill wrapped around a breakdown multiply it several times over.
A Saturday, reconstructed
The extract fan on the roof had been getting louder for a month. On the busiest night of the week its bearing finally seized - and because the gas interlock does exactly what it is designed to do, the moment ventilation could not be proven, the whole cookline lost gas.
What follows is a composite of failures we and our clients have lived through, because the pattern barely changes. The kitchen tries a fryer-and-microwave menu for twenty minutes, then gives up. Front of house comps drinks, cancels the second sitting and turns away walk-ins. An emergency engineer is found on the third phone call, at weekend rates, and diagnoses a fan that cannot be repaired until a part arrives Monday. The restaurant reopens Tuesday lunchtime. The repair invoice, when it comes, is the smallest number in the story.
The real invoice
Run the arithmetic honestly and the shape appears. Lost sales are the headline: a site taking a few hundred pounds an hour at peak loses thousands over a weekend, and those covers do not come back on Tuesday - they went somewhere else. Labour keeps costing while output stops: the brigade was rostered, the prep was done, and both are written off. Stock follows: a walk-in full of weekend prep with no service to absorb it. Then the quieter lines: the emergency premium over a planned visit, the refunds and comps, the review that mentions "kitchen closed", and - if the failure touched refrigeration or extraction - the compliance questions about how it was maintained. Trade repair pricing itself typically lands in the hundreds to low thousands per appliance; it is everything wrapped around it that multiplies the bill several times over.
Post-mortem
Almost every "sudden" breakdown announces itself: a fan that got noisier, a fryer slower to recover, a fridge that ran constantly through a mild week. Kitchens are loud, so the signals get normalised. The sites that dodge these weekends have a simple habit: anything that sounds, smells or performs differently gets written on the board and looked at inside a week, while it is still a £150 part on a weekday rather than a seized assembly on a Saturday.
Extract fans rarely die of old age alone. Grease loading unbalances impellers, coats motors, strains bearings and makes the fan work against ductwork that has quietly lost a third of its airflow. A system cleaned on its proper TR19 Grease interval - roughly every three months for heavy-use kitchens - is not just a fire-safety and insurance obligation; it is the mechanical difference between a fan that lasts and one that fails on the worst possible night. The certificate trail matters for the aftermath too: an insurer or landlord asking questions after a closure will want to see it, as we cover in the certificate that proves your extraction is compliant.
The fix list
Questions
Add four lines: average sales per trading hour at the affected time; the rostered labour cost for the same hours; any stock or prep written off; and the emergency premium over a planned repair. Then add the nights of recovery trading lost if the closure runs on. For most full-service sites the total lands at several times the repair invoice - which is the number to weigh maintenance spend against.
The extraction system. Lose a fridge and you improvise; lose the extract fan and the gas interlock removes the entire cookline at once, exactly as it is designed to. That is why the fan, the ductwork it breathes through, and the grease loading that strains both belong at the top of any planned maintenance list.
Across a year, almost always. A planned visit happens at normal rates on a quiet morning and catches wear while parts are small; a failure happens at peak, at emergency rates, with lost trading stacked on top. The comparison is not repair invoice versus service invoice - it is service invoice versus repair invoice plus every closed cover around it.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Planned TR19 Grease extraction cleans on your usage band - quiet mornings, normal rates, certificate filed.