When a restaurant owner compares quotes for cleaning kitchen equipment, the conversation usually starts and ends with a machine name. That is the wrong order. The questions that decide whether the job will work are about the equipment you already own, the soil you are actually removing, and the room you have to do it in. Below is the list to bring to a supplier, arranged in the order it should be answered.
Ask what surface list the supplier is working from
A quote that names one machine for "the kitchen" has not done any thinking. Ask the supplier to state which surfaces the method covers: hood housings and filters, extract ducts near the hood, griddles, fryer exteriors, ranges, prep tables, dish pit walls, floors. Each of those has a different material, a different soil thickness, and a different rule about what must be covered. If the supplier cannot produce a surface list, send them your own and ask them to answer line by line.
Ask how the soil is being classified
Kitchen grease comes in three practical states: fresh and flowable, emulsified and sticky, and baked-on polymerised layers that have been reheated many times. The third kind is the reason a job runs long and still looks bad. Ask the supplier how they intend to treat the polymerised layer specifically, and whether their answer involves scraping and absorbing first. Any method that puts heat and moisture straight onto a thick baked-on layer tends to move it rather than lift it.
Ask which mode the numbers belong to, and where they were measured
If you are comparing PowerDe HW02 steam cleaner specifications against another quotation, the temperature and pressure figures are only useful if both suppliers say the same thing about them. Ask: is this dry steam or wet steam? Is the temperature measured at the boiler or at the nozzle tip? Is the pressure measured in the boiler or on the working line? A machine that reports one set of numbers with no answers to those questions cannot be compared fairly, and a serious supplier will either state the test method or offer to demonstrate on your own equipment.
Ask what must not get wet in your kitchen
Every kitchen has parts that must be protected before any lance comes near them. Write them down and make the supplier acknowledge the list in writing: electrical enclosures, thermostat and control panels, light fittings and their wiring, fan motors and cable glands, junction boxes, bearing housings, insulation seams, open vents and duct openings, fire-related components and dampers, gas connections and their seals. The person who maintains your equipment should sign that list, not the cleaner. If a supplier is comfortable spraying without such a list, that is your answer about their process.
Ask where the water comes from and where the run-off goes
Ask the supplier how the machine is refilled, and check the answer against your kitchen. Some machines take a mains water line through a fitting; ours is listed with a half-inch tap-water inlet with a four-point internal-tooth joint, so you need to know whether that connection exists near the work area or whether staff will be carrying buckets. Then ask where the loosened grease and rinse water go. Grease run-off must not be washed into a drain that leads to the street. Ask who supplies trays or a collection point, whether the interceptor is in the path, and who cleans up afterwards. Ask the same about the floor: how long until the kitchen floor is safe to walk on, because that number sets your schedule more than the cleaning time does.
Ask what the kitchen has to supply: power, water, access
Ask whether the socket you intend to use is on a protected circuit, and whether the cable can reach the work area without crossing the pass or the dining room. A fixed machine is a floor space decision as much as a cleaning decision: check the footprint with handles, the doorway it must pass through, the hose swing needed to reach the far side of the hood, and the standing room for the operator. Power and water questions belong to your site, so ask the supplier to walk the site with you before recommending a configuration. If they cannot visit, they should be quoting from your measurements and photographs rather than from a product page.
Ask for a trial on your dirt, with your staff
Ask whether the supplier will run a trial on the dirtiest hood you have, operated by the people who will do this work every week. During that trial, insist that four things are held constant and written down: the mode, the distance from the surface to the nozzle, the speed of the pass, and how the loosened residue is removed. Then measure what matters to you: minutes per hood, how many refills were needed, how far staff walked for water, and how long before the area could be used again. Those numbers become your baseline, and every later comparison is judged against them rather than against marketing claims.
Ask how the job will be accepted and recorded
Ask the supplier to agree, before the work, what "finished" means for each surface: bare metal visible on the treated hood panels, no residue in the grease troughs, filters refitted and seated, no standing water inside the housing, lights and controls confirmed working, floor dry and safe. Ask for one line of record per unit, with date, operator, mode, and any fault. If you are inspected, that record is worth more than a photograph of a shiny hood, and it also tells you later which step of the method is failing.
Ask who maintains the cleaning machine itself
Ask about the maintenance of the machine in the same conversation as the purchase: who is responsible for descaling when the incoming water is hard, who checks nozzle and hose condition each shift, and what happens when a protective cut-out stops the machine. A machine that has scaled up presents as weak cleaning performance, and the fault is in the water, not in the operator. Ask that the descaling interval and the filter checks be named in the same document that states the cleaning parameters. For a fixed machine, ask which consumables wear out, what they cost, and how quickly replacements arrive.
Ask about the whole product range before choosing a configuration
A single site rarely has one task. Before choosing, review the commercial kitchen steam cleaning options as a range: a fixed machine for a fixed hood line, a pushed or driven unit where the work moves between areas, and a hand-pushed machine where access is tight. If your layout, service windows, or equipment shape do not match a published configuration, use customised kitchen equipment enquiries instead of forcing a compromise. When you write that enquiry, send the surface list, photographs of the fouling taken from the same angle each time, your timing record from the trial, and the power and water facts for the position. Do not ask which model is best; describe the job and ask for a method.
Where to send the questions
If you want written answers to the questions above, send them with your surface list to the PowerDe contact team rather than asking for a model number. A supplier who can answer all of them has a method; a supplier who cannot will still sell you a machine, but the cleaning will land on your staff to solve.
