Phoenix Journal · Ductwork
When a commercial kitchen burns, the loss adjuster who follows decides whether your claim is paid. Here is what they inspect in your extraction system and your paperwork - and how to be ready.
After the fire
The fire is out, the kitchen is a shell, and a stranger with a clipboard and a camera is standing where your pass used to be. This is the loss adjuster, and what they find in the next hour shapes whether your claim is paid in full, reduced, or refused.
Loss adjusters are appointed by the insurer, not by you, and their job is to establish two things: what actually happened, and whether the terms of your policy were met before it happened. In a commercial kitchen, the second question almost always leads them to the extraction system. Grease-laden ductwork is the most common route by which a small flare-up becomes a total loss, and it is the first place an experienced adjuster goes looking for a reason to question the claim. They are not being difficult. They are testing whether the story the building tells matches the story you tell, and whether you did what your policy quietly required of you all along.
Understanding how they read a scene - and a filing cabinet - is the difference between a stressful but survivable event and a business-ending one. Below is what they look for, in the order they tend to look for it.
An adjuster forms an early hypothesis within minutes of arriving, then spends the rest of the visit trying to confirm or disprove it. In a kitchen fire, the extraction canopy, filters and the run of duct above the ceiling are the headline exhibits. The physical condition of that system tells a professional a great deal before a single document is produced.
The canopy and the first metres of duct are the obvious starting point, but a thorough adjuster follows the whole run - through the ceiling void, across the roof space and out to the fan and discharge. They are checking whether fire travelled through the ductwork, and how readily it did so. Heavy, baked-on grease deposits are treated as accelerant. If a small fire spread rapidly because the duct was effectively lined with fuel, that spread becomes central to the investigation, even where the ignition source had nothing to do with the extract system itself.
The reference point most UK adjusters and their fire investigators fall back on is TR19® Grease, the specification for fire risk management of kitchen extraction published by the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA). It sets a measurable benchmark: grease should be controlled so it does not exceed a mean average of 200 microns - roughly half the thickness of a business card - between cleans. Deposits are assessed by a Deposit Thickness Test or Wet Film Thickness Test. Between 200 and 999 microns, cleaning is due; at 1,000 microns or more the system is treated as a significant fire risk. When an adjuster or their expert measures build-up well past those figures, the physical evidence alone suggests the system was not being maintained to a recognised standard, and that shifts the conversation from "what caused the fire" to "why was it allowed to spread".
Most commercial kitchen insurance policies carry a condition requiring the extraction system to be cleaned to a recognised standard at appropriate intervals, with records kept. That clause sits quietly in the policy wording until the day you need to claim, at which point it becomes the single most important sentence in the document. The adjuster's job is to check you honoured it, and the burden of proof sits with you, not with them.
A generic invoice reading "kitchen cleaned" is rarely enough to satisfy scrutiny. Adjusters increasingly expect measurable, defensible evidence: certificates that name the standard, schematics showing which sections were reached, and before-and-after photographs. Frequency matters too. As a rule of thumb, heavy-use kitchens running twelve hours or more a day are cleaned quarterly, moderate use every six months, and light use annually - and your records need to show you met the interval appropriate to your operation. Just as importantly, if a previous clean flagged an inaccessible run or a section that could not be reached, the adjuster will want to see what you did about it.
The pattern that sinks claims is depressingly consistent: cleaning that was overdue, undocumented, or carried out only on the visible surfaces while the concealed duct was never touched. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 you are almost certainly the Responsible Person for your premises, with a legal duty to assess and manage fire risk - and grease in extract ducts is a textbook example of the hazard that duty covers. If your paperwork cannot show the system was maintained to standard, the adjuster has grounds to argue a policy condition was breached, and a claim can be reduced or refused outright regardless of how the fire started. The way to stay on the right side of that line is unglamorous but reliable: clean the whole system to TR19® Grease on a schedule that matches your usage, keep every certificate and report, and act on what the reports tell you. If you are unsure where your own duties begin, it is worth understanding what being the Responsible Person under fire law actually requires of you before an adjuster explains it the hard way.
Questions
Yes. Most commercial kitchen policies include a condition requiring the extraction system to be cleaned to a recognised standard, usually TR19 Grease, with records kept. If a loss adjuster finds heavy grease build-up and no evidence of scheduled, documented cleaning, the insurer can argue the condition was breached. A claim can then be reduced or refused even where the extract system did not cause the fire, because grease-laden ductwork helps a fire spread.
Keep a TR19 Grease certificate for every clean, showing the date and the areas covered, along with the post-clean verification report and deposit measurements. Add before-and-after photographs and a schematic marking which sections were cleaned and any that could not be reached. Crucially, record any recommendations your contractor made and the action you took in response, so the file shows a system that was actively maintained rather than simply visited.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix surveys and cleans kitchen and building ductwork to the TR19 standard - measured, cleaned and certificated, UK-wide.