Kitchen piping is easy to ignore: it runs above your head, it is out of the crew's reach, and the deposits inside it are invisible until something drips or a fire risk assessor asks about the extract system. Costing it is difficult for the same reasons. Most budgets carry one line — "hood and duct cleaning, annual" — and a contractor's invoice, so the facility has no way to tell whether a cheaper quote cleaned less, or whether the expensive one was padded.
The way to evaluate the cost is to build it from the work content rather than from the invoice. The steps below turn a recurring line item into a number you can compare between contractors, between buildings, and between years.
1. Define the piping scope before you price it
"Kitchen piping" covers several different systems with different work content, and a quote that does not name them cannot be compared with another quote. Write the scope out as a list:
- Extract ducts, hoods, fans and the vertical riser, including the parts reachable only from a roof or a ceiling void;
- Water supply and hot-water pipework serving the cooking line, the pot wash and the hand-wash basins;
- Waste and drainage runs under the floor, including traps and the grease interceptor;
- Gas pipework and its isolation valves, which are cleaned to a different rule and usually by a gas-competent trade;
- Condensate and steam lines, where a kitchen relies on steam cooking or a steam generator.
For each system record the accessible surfaces and the ones that are not, because inaccessible length is the first thing a contractor prices differently. A building with sealed ducting and one ceiling access panel will attract a quote that either skips the closed sections or charges to open and reinstate them — and the difference between those two answers is often larger than the difference between two cleaning methods.
2. Measure the deposit, do not assume the interval
Most cleaning budgets are copied from the previous year's budget, which was copied from the contract, not from what is actually on the surfaces. Cost follows the deposit, so look at the deposit. Two visits a year are worth doing on the same schedule — once when the kitchen has been running hard for weeks, once shortly after a clean — so you can see what builds between services.
For each system, record:
- Whether the deposit is fresh oil, a varnished polymerised film, or a mixture with combustion carbon;
- How far the deposit extends from the hood face into the duct;
- Whether there is standing water, scale, or a smell at the interceptor;
- Which surfaces the crew can reach with a ladder and which need a lift, a roof access, or a ceiling cut.
These observations decide the method before they decide the price. Fresh oil and loose grease respond to detergent and pressure. A baked-on film that has been heated repeatedly does not move with cold water and a scrubbing pad, and a crew that is told to remove it that way will either leave it there or take twice the labour quoted. For that class of deposit, commercial kitchen steam cleaning is the practical route, because heat softens the polymerised layer before pressure moves it.
3. Price the cleaning in labour hours, not in "a day"
Convert every quoted job into hours and crew size, because that is the only figure that travels between contractors. Take each surface from your scope list and ask the same four questions: how many people, how many hours, how many passes over the worst sections, and what preparation and reinstatement time sits around the cleaning itself.
Hidden hours are what separate two quotes that look identical. They usually sit in:
- Lagging and unlagging, panel removal, and making good afterwards;
- Covering and clearing the kitchen below the pipework so food, packaging and dry goods are not wetted;
- Moving equipment away from the wall and putting it back;
- Setting up and tearing down access equipment, permits, and the time spent waiting for a building manager with a roof key;
- Drying and re-commissioning, including any functional check before the line is used again.
Ask each contractor to state hours against each system rather than a lump sum for "kitchen pipework". Where one quote is cheaper, the answer is almost always in a line that has been left out.
4. Cost the downtime window, not just the crew
In most kitchens the pipework clean closes something — a hood, a servery, a pot wash, or the whole cooking line. That closure is a real cost and it belongs in the comparison, even when the contractor never mentions it.
Write the window down as hours of lost covers, lost production, or a shifted menu. Then compare the methods against that clock:
- A hose-and-scrub clean leaves water on floors, under equipment and in the area beneath the pipework, and the area has to dry before it is safe to walk on or cook under;
- High-temperature steam puts far less free water onto the surface, so the return-to-service window is shorter — on a line that cannot be closed, that saving often outweighs the difference in equipment cost;
- A clean done out of hours costs a shift premium but keeps the kitchen trading; a clean done during the day costs no premium but closes the line.
Time the return-to-service during the first two cleans and use your own figures from the third year on. Guessing at downtime is how facilities end up buying the wrong method.
5. Add water, chemicals, waste and energy to the same line
Consumables decide whether a cheap clean is cheap. Ask what each method consumes and where the run-off goes:
- Water. Ask how much water a method uses per clean and whether the machine is plumbed to a tap supply or carries its own tank. A plumbed unit needs a wash point near the work; a self-contained unit from the Cleaning Equipment Series can be moved between floors and servery areas where services are awkward.
- Chemicals. Degreaser dosing, contact time, and descaling where the water supply is hard. Heat and pressure can do part of the work that would otherwise need a heavier chemical dose and a longer dwell, which matters in a food area.
- Waste. Greasy run-off has to reach the site's waste route through the interceptor, not a prep-area sink or a surface drain. Interceptor emptying frequency and cost should rise or fall with the cleaning method, and the invoice should show it.
- Energy. A machine that heats water to high temperature draws power. Fixed units are usually wired to a 220 V supply; battery-powered mobile units are limited by run time and need a charging place. Record which option your building can actually support.
Put these four items in the same column as labour. A method that looks cheaper on labour and heavier on water, chemicals and disposal is often more expensive once a year of cleans is totalled.
6. Compare owned equipment with a contractor on a three-year basis
Facilities often treat "buy a machine" and "hire a contractor" as unrelated decisions. Cost them side by side over three years:
- Contractor route: the annual contract, plus every extra visit for a job discovered late, plus the premium for out-of-hours work.
- Owned route: purchase price, the crew hours it takes to run the machine, consumables, spares and seals, the service interval, and training for the people who will actually hold the wand.
Reading the specification table properly matters here. Published figures for the Fixed Steam Cleaning Machine PowerDe HW02 include a 6 kW heating output, 160°C steam temperature, 0.8 MPa vapour pressure, an 80 L tank in SUS304, a tap-water inlet, and 220 V working voltage, in a cabinet of 1,200 × 800 × 1,200 mm including handles. Check the tank volume and the water inlet against your building before you assume the machine can run the job in one go: if the run needs more water than the tank holds, the crew spends part of the quoted hours refilling, and the same site conditions may need a plumbed point that does not exist yet.
The same table should include what your team will not use the machine for. A unit bought for kitchen piping that also handles the car park, the loading bay and the exterior of a service van earns its cost faster than one that comes out twice a year.
7. Do not leave safety and access out of the cost
Two cost items on kitchen pipework are skipped in most budgets and appear as an emergency later:
- Access. Roof access, ceiling voids, lifts, scaffolding, permits, and out-of-hours building escort. These should be priced, not absorbed.
- Safe operation. Steam at high temperature scalds. Any method using it needs isolation and cooling time stated first, so nobody puts steam onto a hot surface and gets an immediate flash of vapour in their face; trained operators; barriers and signage below the work; and protection of electrical components, thermostats and terminal enclosures near the pipework.
Ask what protection a machine provides and how it reports a fault. The published product description for the HW02 lists leakage, short-circuit, high-temperature, high-voltage, water-shortage and high-voltage-explosion protection. Crews need to know these exist — and also that a machine which trips one of them must be reported rather than reset again and again during a shift.
8. Set acceptance criteria you can verify, and keep the evidence
A cost you cannot verify is a cost you cannot control. For each system in the scope, write a check someone can complete in seconds: no visible grease film on accessible duct and hood surfaces, no residue blocking the trap or the interceptor inlet, no scale choking a spray orifice, no standing water under the pipework, no detergent smell on a surface that touches food. Record the date, the crew, the method, and the areas that were closed off and not reached.
Keep the signed records with interceptor-emptying paperwork. Deposits in extract pipework are a fire matter as well as a hygiene matter, and the evidence of what was cleaned and when is worth as much as the clean itself when an assessor or an insurer asks.
9. Build the model, then review it against what happened
Put it all in one table: system, accessible length, deposit class, method, crew hours, downtime hours, water, chemicals, waste, energy, access cost, and the acceptance result. Fill the same table after every clean from the contractor's invoice and your own log.
After two cycles, the table tells you which line is moving. If a system keeps needing extra hours, the interval is wrong or the method is wrong. If a contractor's hours keep rising while the deposit does not change, ask what is being done that the scope did not name. If your own crew's hours fall every year on the same job, that is the case for owning the equipment.
Where the layout is awkward — sealed duct runs, a servery with no wash point, several kitchens sharing one crew — specify the equipment against the building rather than buying from a catalogue. Shenzhen PowerDe Automation Precision Equipment publishes the parameters for each model in its cleaning range and offers customized steam cleaning equipment matched to your site conditions.
Send the piping scope, the access photographs and your last two invoices to the contact page and ask for a method, a configuration and a duty cycle matched to your kitchen. You will get a cost you can compare instead of a price you have to accept.
