Commercial kitchen extraction by sector
Kitchen Extraction Services for Pubs & Bars
What does extraction in a pub kitchen have to deal with?
A pub kitchen is usually a commercial kitchen fitted into a building that was never designed to hold one. The extract has to get grease-laden air out of a room chosen for its position in the floor plan rather than its route to the roof, which means long horizontal duct runs, awkward bends and a discharge point that had to go somewhere acceptable rather than somewhere ideal. A fryer and a grill then produce most of the load on a very small footprint.
What is different about a pub extract system
Two things, and they compound each other. The first is the building. A restaurant unit was fitted out as a restaurant, so the riser and the roof fan were on the drawing. A pub kitchen was carved out of a back room, and the duct then had to find a way out: along a ceiling void, round a structural beam, through a chimney breast, often out through a rear wall instead of up. Every bend is resistance the fan has to overcome, and listed building consent can rule out the straight answer.
The second is the appliance mix. A pub menu concentrates its output in two appliances. The fryer produces vapour that condenses as soon as it meets a cooler duct wall, and the grill adds particulate. Both sit under one section of canopy, so the filters above them load several times faster than those at the other end of the same bank, and the first few metres of duct foul much faster than the rest. One average reading hides that, which is why readings are taken at named points.
One more fault is not technical at all. Where the pub is leased or tied, the lease decides whether the extract belongs to the tenant or the landlord, and the two often disagree at exactly the moment the fan fails. Reading that clause before you need it is worth an hour.
When can the work be done without stopping trade?
A pub has a window a restaurant does not, because the bar and the kitchen keep different hours. Food service commonly stops well before the bar closes, so the kitchen can be cold and clear while the pub is still trading. That is the right slot for a full duct clean, and the most useful scheduling fact about this sector.
Food-light weekday afternoons take fan servicing, belts, filter housings and access panel surveys without touching a cover. The job that needs planning is retrofitting access panels into a retrofitted duct run: noisy, needs the ceiling void open, best done on a closed day, and the thing that makes every clean after it measurable instead of estimated.
Where a pub operator stands with the EHO and the insurer
The same environmental health team that inspects the kitchen deals with odour complaints from neighbours, and a low-level discharge in a residential street starts both conversations at once. Fire risk sits with the responsible person for the premises under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, and a grease-laden duct threading through the fabric of an old building is a material part of that assessment.
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.
BESA publishes baseline cleaning intervals of 3, 6 and 12 months by daily cooking hours, subject to a competent person conducting a cleanliness risk assessment. A pub doing eight hours of frying can foul faster than a kitchen open twelve, so the reading should set the next visit rather than the calendar. Where a section cannot be reached, we record that and what access would be needed.
What tends to go wrong here
- Smells in the bar or the beer garden, from a discharge terminating at low level on a rear wall because there was no route to the roof. The complaint usually arrives from a neighbour rather than a customer.
- Extraction that has never been strong, because of a long horizontal run with more bends than the fan was sized for. The fan is doing what it was specified to do; the resistance in front of it is not what anyone assumed.
- Grease staining below the discharge point, where grease has condensed and run back down a horizontal section with no fall and no drain point. The run is holding more than it is moving.
- Nobody can say when the duct was last cleaned, almost always because there are no access panels. A run built to get through a wall rarely had inspection hatches specified, so nothing past the plenum has been seen.
- Cold draughts through the bar during service, from the extract pulling its replacement air through the trade area because no make-up air was designed. It drags kitchen smells the same way.