Commercial kitchen extraction by sector
Kitchen Extraction Services for Hotels
What does extraction in a hotel kitchen have to deal with?
A hotel extract system serves a breakfast peak, a dinner peak and a long quiet middle, then absorbs banqueting loads several times heavier than either. The ductwork travels much further than in any other kitchen: from a ground or basement kitchen, along a horizontal run, then up a riser through occupied floors to a roof fan. Because that riser crosses fire compartments and passes sleeping accommodation, access panels and fire-stopping are the difficult part rather than the cleaning.
What is different about a hotel extract system
Two structural facts drive everything else. The first is that a hotel rarely has one kitchen. A main kitchen, usually a banqueting kitchen, often a bar servery and a staff canteen, each with its own canopy, duct and fan, each fouling at a different rate. Treating them as one system on one schedule is the common mistake here: the banqueting kitchen sits idle for weeks and then runs harder in one evening than the main kitchen does in a fortnight.
The second is the length of the run, and what it passes through:
| Stage | What it means |
|---|---|
| Canopy and plenum | The part everyone photographs, and the smallest share of the duct volume. A quote priced on canopy area tells you little. |
| The horizontal to the riser | Often long, because the kitchen sits where deliveries needed it. Bends here set the resistance the fan works against. |
| The vertical riser | Grease-laden ductwork climbing through occupied floors inside a service shaft. |
| Compartment penetrations | Every floor slab and fire-rated wall the duct crosses has to be fire-stopped and stay that way. Access is cut without undoing it. |
| Roof plant | Fan and discharge, often within earshot of bedrooms. Bearing noise a restaurant ignores for a month becomes a complaint the first night. |
TR19 Grease expects access at direction changes and along a run, so the system can be measured rather than assumed. Putting that access into a riser inside a live hotel is the hard engineering here. Panels have to land in a service cupboard or a back-of-house corridor rather than behind a guest bathroom, and each one has to leave the fire compartment exactly as it found it.
When can the work be done without stopping service?
The quiet middle between breakfast and dinner is real, but be honest about what fits in it. Filter changes, fan servicing, belts, canopy lighting, access panel surveys and most repairs fit comfortably. A full clean of a multi-storey riser does not.
Riser work is overnight work. The kitchen has to be cold, the shaft open at several levels at once, and the floors nearest the access points are better held back from sale than apologised to in the morning. Breakfast is the hardest service to move in the sector, so the window closes earlier than people expect. Banqueting kitchens are the opposite: the diary is known months ahead, so the clean goes into a real gap. That is the argument for a fixed-schedule contract here. The constraint is not the work, it is finding the night, and a quarter ahead is far easier than a week ahead.
Where a hotel operator stands with the EHO and the insurer
The responsible person for the premises has duties under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, assessed here against a building where people sleep. A grease-laden duct running vertically through occupied floors is a material item in that fire risk assessment, not a housekeeping detail. Environmental health inspects the kitchens, and food hygiene law requires suitable and sufficient ventilation in food premises.
Most commercial insurers treat TR19-compliant kitchen extract cleaning as a condition of cover or a key factor in assessing fire claims. Failing to keep your extract system TR19-compliant, or lacking documentation, can jeopardise your right to indemnity and give your insurer grounds to dispute or reduce a claim.
The record has to cover every system, not the one easiest to reach. BESA publishes baseline intervals of 3, 6 and 12 months by daily cooking hours, subject to a competent person conducting a cleanliness risk assessment, and across four kitchens on four duty cycles those intervals will not line up. Where a riser section cannot be reached, we record that and what access would be needed, so the gap is visible in the document rather than hidden by it.
What tends to go wrong here
- Riser sections never opened. If the panels were never fitted, or were plasterboarded over in a refurbishment, nobody can say what is in the duct, and reports covering the canopy and the first accessible metres look reassuring for the wrong reason.
- Fire-stopping disturbed by other trades. Risers collect cables, pipework and later alterations, and a penetration opened for something else and never made good sits on the grease route.
- Odour in guest corridors. Nearly always make-up air: a kitchen in negative pressure pulls replacement air from the corridor, and everything the corridor connects to notices.
- Night-time fan noise. Roof plant near bedrooms is judged by a sleeping guest, not a chef, so bearing wear surfaces earlier here than anywhere else.
- Split ownership. The kitchen belongs to food and beverage, the riser and roof to maintenance, and the contract often covers one and not the other. Faults live in the gap.