Phoenix Journal · Extraction
Sensors on your canopy, filters and fan can flag a blocked run or a failing motor days before anyone in the kitchen notices. Here is what remote monitoring of kitchen extraction can and cannot do for a busy commercial site.
Kitchen extraction
Most extraction problems announce themselves late - a kitchen that feels hot and smoky, a fan that trips on a busy Friday, or a grease reading that fails a post-clean check nobody saw coming.
Remote monitoring turns that around. By fitting sensors to the canopy, the grease filters, the ductwork and the fan, you get a continuous picture of how the system is actually performing rather than a snapshot taken twice a year. It will not clean the duct for you, and it will never remove the need for a competent hand with a deposit gauge. What it does do is tell you when something has changed - a filter loading up, airflow dropping, a motor drawing more current than it should - so you can act on a small problem instead of paying for a large one. Here is how it fits alongside a proper TR19 Grease cleaning regime.
A monitoring package is only as good as the things it measures. The readings that matter most on a commercial kitchen extraction system tend to fall into three groups.
It helps to be clear about the standard the whole system is judged against. TR19 Grease, published by the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA), is the recognised UK specification for the inspection and cleaning of grease extract ductwork. It sets the fire-risk benchmark that insurers and enforcing officers look for, and it works in numbers. Grease deposits should be controlled so that they do not exceed a mean average of 200 microns between cleans - roughly half the thickness of a business card - with any localised region of 500 microns or more needing spot cleaning, and post-clean verification expected to show less than 50 microns remaining. Those figures are confirmed by a Wet Film Thickness Test or Deposit Thickness Test carried out by a competent person, not by a sensor.
This is the important distinction. Remote monitoring does not measure deposit thickness inside the duct, so it can never issue a TR19 Grease post-clean verification report on its own. What it does brilliantly is manage the interval between those physical checks. TR19 Grease deliberately moves away from a rigid calendar - the old rules of thumb of a three-monthly clean for heavy use of twelve to sixteen hours a day, six-monthly for moderate use and annually for light use are now treated as starting points, with the real frequency set by a cleanliness risk assessment. Monitoring gives that risk assessment live evidence. If your filter pressure and cooking hours show grease building far faster than expected, you bring the clean forward. If a quiet season means the system is barely loading, you have documented grounds to review the schedule rather than clean to no purpose.
There is a compliance dividend too. Most commercial property and contents insurers now expect documented proof of TR19 Grease cleaning, and a claim after a kitchen fire can be refused where that evidence is missing. A monitoring dashboard that timestamps filter alerts, fan faults and cleaning dates alongside your post-clean certificates builds exactly the audit trail that stands up to post-fire scrutiny. It shows not only that the system was cleaned, but that it was watched between cleans.
The systems that pay for themselves share a few habits. They set alarm thresholds from a baseline taken when the duct is genuinely clean, so a rising pressure drop means something. They route alerts to a named person rather than a shared inbox nobody reads. And they treat the data as a prompt for skilled work, not a substitute for it - a filter alert triggers a filter change, a persistent airflow drop triggers an inspection hatch survey and a proper clean.
Monitoring also earns its place on demand-controlled systems. Where a kitchen runs demand-controlled kitchen ventilation, the same sensor logic that trims fan speed to match cooking activity can feed your maintenance view, so you see energy use and grease loading in one place. Even without that, watching the fan for the strain that external conditions put on it is worthwhile - if you have ever noticed extraction working worse on windy days, pressure sensors are what let you separate a genuine wind-driven pressure issue from a duct that is quietly clogging up.
None of this replaces the cleaning contract. It sharpens it. You clean when the evidence says clean, you prove it when the insurer or fire officer asks, and you stop guessing about the weeks in between.
Questions
No. Monitoring watches airflow, filter pressure, fan health and cooking hours, but it does not measure grease deposit thickness inside the ductwork. Only a competent person carrying out a Wet Film Thickness or Deposit Thickness Test can verify you are within the TR19 Grease thresholds and issue the post-clean report your insurer expects. Monitoring tells you when to clean; it never certifies that you have.
The pressure drop across the grease filters is usually the single most useful measurement. As filters load up with grease, the pressure difference rises, which is an early sign that airflow is about to suffer and that deposits are building downstream. Catching that trend lets you clean or swap filters before the fan is straining and before grease starts collecting deep in the duct.
Yes, as supporting evidence. Most UK insurers now require documented proof of TR19 Grease compliance, and claims after a kitchen fire can be refused without it. A monitoring dashboard that timestamps filter alerts, fan faults and cleaning dates alongside your post-clean certificates strengthens that audit trail. It should sit beside your TR19 Grease verification reports, not in place of them.
TR19 Grease sets cleaning intervals by a cleanliness risk assessment rather than a fixed calendar, using heavy, moderate and light use only as starting points. Live data on filter pressure and cooking hours gives that assessment real evidence. If grease is building faster than expected you bring the clean forward; if the system is barely loading you have documented grounds to review the schedule instead of cleaning needlessly.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
The right kit only helps if the system stays clean. Phoenix degreases canopies, filters and ductwork to TR19 Grease - UK-wide, overnight.