Commercial kitchen extraction
Kitchen Extraction Maintenance Contracts
What is a kitchen extraction maintenance contract?
A kitchen extraction maintenance contract is a fixed schedule of visits that keeps the parts with a known wear rate ahead of failure: grease separators, belts, bearings, fan balance and the controls that hold the interlock open. Each visit ends with a written record. The purpose is not to make a system last forever, but to move failures out of service time and into a booked slot.
- Maintenance contract
- From £385 +VAT a year
- No call-out charge on contracted sites.
No survey fee. A price is agreed before work starts, not after.
What a planned maintenance visit includes
A visit is a fixed order of checks, not a look around.
| Component | What is done |
|---|---|
| Grease separators | Removed, checked, cleaned or replaced. Housings and seals with them. |
| Fan and drive | Belt wear, pulley alignment, bearing noise, impeller balance, motor current. |
| Controls | Contactors, isolators, overloads, speed control and time clock. |
| Interlock signal | The ventilation side proven: proving switches, sensors, and the gas signal. |
| Canopy and duct | Lighting, access panel seals, duct condition, grease loading. |
| Record | What was checked, what changed, and what is wearing. |
The gas side of an interlock is Gas Safe registered work and we do not carry it out. Everything it reads sits with us, and four of the five common causes of a trip live there. How the interlock works.
Why is my extractor fan noisy or vibrating?
Almost always bearings, a belt, or an impeller thrown out of balance by uneven grease. All three announce themselves: a bearing gets louder over weeks, a belt slips before it snaps, and an impeller drifts slowly enough that the person under it stops hearing it.
What fails on a schedule, and what does not
Wearing parts follow a predictable curve: separators load up, belts stretch and glaze, bearings dry out. Catching them means choosing when the system is down. Other failures follow no curve. A contactor welds shut, a board fails, or the appliance line changes and a correct system is undersized. No schedule prevents those.
How often should filters be cleaned or replaced?
Separators are the fastest-moving part of the system, and how quickly they load depends on what is cooked and for how long. They are replaced when the mesh or baffle stops separating properly, not on a fixed date. Ductwork is a different question: BESA publishes baseline intervals set by daily cooking hours, and those are starting points subject to a competent person conducting a cleanliness risk assessment. How TR19 grease cleaning works.
Why a scheduled visit costs less than the callout it prevents
A contract visit is booked when the kitchen is closed, by an engineer carrying the parts the system uses. A callout happens mid-service, often at the out-of-hours rate, with whatever is on the van. Callouts start from £199 +VAT with hourly work at £80 plus VAT, but the cost that hurts is the lost service. What a repair visit involves.
What a contract includes, and what it excludes
Included: the scheduled visits and the checks above, consumables such as belts, and the written record.
Excluded: major parts such as motors, fan assemblies and boards; ductwork cleaning to TR19, priced as its own job; weather or third party damage; and the gas side of an interlock. Where a part is needed you hear the price before it is ordered.
Who is responsible, landlord or tenant?
The lease decides. No general rule puts extraction with one side or the other, and the implied repairing terms that apply to short residential tenancies under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 do not cover a commercial lease. Four things are worth finding in it:
- The repairing covenant, and whether the system sits inside the demised premises or is landlord plant recovered through a service charge.
- Whether the canopy and ductwork went in as a previous tenant’s fixture, which often decides who repairs it.
- Any yield-up clause, since a system you maintain may still have to go.
- Alterations consent for a new duct route or discharge point.
Separately from the lease, workplaces and their ventilation equipment have to be kept in an efficient state and in good working order, whoever pays. This page says where the answer lives. It is not legal advice.
What a contract does not do
It does not make a system immortal, turn an undersized canopy into a correctly sized one, or create make-up air that was never designed in. It holds a system at the level it was built to, so where it was built wrong the honest answer is correction, not a contract. How a system is designed and installed.
Sources
- Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, regulation 5, maintenance of the workplace and of its equipment and ventilation systems: legislation.gov.uk. Checked 15 August 2026.
- Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998, regulation 5, maintenance: legislation.gov.uk. Checked 15 August 2026.
- Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, section 11, implied repairing terms and the tenancies they apply to: legislation.gov.uk. Checked 15 August 2026.
- Kitchen extract system cleaning, source for the baseline interval position: BESA. Checked 15 August 2026.
- Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, the basis for gas work being carried out by a registered engineer: legislation.gov.uk. Checked 15 August 2026.