What is BESA and what is the Vent Hygiene Register?

BESA is the Building Engineering Services Association, the trade body that publishes TR19 Grease, the specification most UK insurers and environmental health officers refer to for kitchen extract cleanliness. The Vent Hygiene Register is its list of member companies audited against that specification.

Can a contractor clean to TR19 without being on the register?

Yes. TR19 Grease is a published specification and any competent contractor can work to it. The register is third party verification that a company has been audited against it, which is a different claim from following it, and the two are worth keeping separate when you are comparing quotes.

Will my insurer accept a report from a contractor who is not listed?

Most policies ask for evidence that the system was cleaned to TR19 rather than naming a register, so what matters is the content of the report: coverage, measurements, photographs and the sections that could not be reached. Check your own policy wording, because some schedules do name a register and yours may be one of them.

How will I know when the listing completes?

The status note at the top of this page is generated from a single value in the site code, so the day membership is confirmed it changes here and on every other page that carries it at the same time. There is no version of this site where one page says listed and another says pending.

BESA Accreditation | Kitchen Extraction Cleaning

This page exists because “BESA” appears on almost every kitchen extract cleaning website in the country, usually beside a logo and rarely with an explanation. Here is what the word covers, what we do today, and what we are not entitled to say yet.

What BESA and TR19 Grease actually are

BESA is the Building Engineering Services Association. Among many other things it publishes TR19 Grease, the specification that sets out how grease contamination in a commercial kitchen extract system is measured, cleaned and recorded. When an insurer’s schedule or an environmental health officer asks for evidence that a system is clean, TR19 Grease is usually the document underneath the request, whether or not it is named.

The Vent Hygiene Register is a separate thing. It is BESA’s list of member companies that have been audited against the specification. Following the specification and being listed on the register are two different claims. Many contractor websites blur them, and the blur is worth understanding before you compare quotations.

Following the methodology, in practice

The status note above states where our application stands. What follows is what the methodology means on the day of the job, which is the part you can check.

Measure before touching anything. Grease deposit is recorded as an average wet film thickness in microns, taken at defined points through the system rather than at the easiest one. TR19 Grease treats 200 microns as the maximum average before cleaning is required, and 500 microns at any single point as the trigger for a localised clean regardless of the average. Those two figures are the ones worth writing down, because they are what turns “it looks dirty” into a decision anybody can audit.

Open the system rather than working through it. Access panels go where the duct run needs them, not where the ladder happens to reach. A system with no access panels is not a system that does not need them; it is a system nobody has opened yet, and the quotation should say so.

Clean to the metal, including the parts nobody sees. The filters and the canopy face are the visible fraction. The plenum behind the filters, the horizontal runs, the risers and the fan housing itself carry most of the risk and take most of the time.

Measure again, photograph, and record what was not reached. The report names the sections cleaned, the readings before and after, and, in every honest report, the sections that could not be reached and the reason. Every system has some. A report with no exceptions listed is a report that was not written on site.

Cleaning frequency is set by daily cooking hours, subject to a competent person conducting a cleanliness risk assessment. The banding is explained on our guide to how often extract ducts should be cleaned.

One figure you will see quoted that we will not publish

You will see a post-clean target of under 50 microns quoted widely across contractor websites, usually with no source attached. We could not trace it to BESA or to any other primary document, so we do not certify against it and we do not repeat it. Two figures on this page carry a source, and the third is the interval banding. Anything else you see quoted as a TR19 number is worth asking the source of, including on this site.

What we are not saying on this page

We are not describing ourselves as audited, listed or approved by BESA, because the application has not completed. TR19 is a BESA registered trademark and the register is a membership record, so the only honest form of this page while the application is open is the one you are reading.

That has a practical consequence worth stating. If your insurance schedule specifically names the Vent Hygiene Register rather than asking for TR19 compliance in general, we are not the right contractor for that requirement today, and we would rather tell you now than after the invoice. Read your schedule, or send it over and we will read it with you.

What to ask any contractor about this

Ask whether they are following the specification or listed on the register, and ask them to say which. Ask what the average wet film thickness was before they started and after they finished. Ask for a report from a comparable kitchen. The answers separate contractors far more reliably than the logo does.

Our TR19 grease cleaning service sets out what a job includes, and the TR19 certificate page shows what the record you receive should contain.