Ask a cleaning contractor for a kitchen ventilation quote and you will usually get one number for the whole job. That single price makes it nearly impossible to decide what to clean more often, what to clean less often, or whether doing part of the work in-house is cheaper than hiring out the rest. A facility that wants to control this cost needs to price the components separately, because a hood panel, a duct run and a fan housing each take a different amount of labour and require different equipment.
The good news is that component-level costing does not need an accountant. It needs a written scope, a labour rate, an equipment line, and a record of how long each task actually takes. Once those four inputs exist, the same sheet answers every follow-up question: which interval to choose, whether to buy a machine, and what a contractor should be charging.
Price the components, not the room
Break the ventilation system into the parts your staff or a contractor physically touches:
- Hood canopy interior surfaces, filters and grease cups
- Horizontal duct runs, risers and access panels
- Fan housing, impeller and the exhaust outlet
- The cooking surfaces above the line that feed grease into the canopy: griddles, fryers, grills, and the wall shielding between them
Write down for each part the measured length or surface area, the number of access panels that must be removed and refitted, and whether the work happens at height or over live equipment. Area in square metres, not "the kitchen", is the unit you will cost against.
Build the cost from four lines
For every component, the cost of one cleaning cycle is the sum of four items. Price them separately so you can see what moves when you change the method:
- Labour hours. Hands-on time plus setup, covering and clearing the work area, and refitting panels. Use the hours your own crew logged, or the hours a contractor stated on a completed job, not their estimate for an untouched site.
- Equipment. Either the contractor's equipment charge, or your machine's purchase price spread over its expected working life plus energy and maintenance. A fixed commercial kitchen steam cleaning unit on a 6 kW element is an electricity and depreciation line, not a consumable one.
- Chemicals and disposal. Detergent, degreaser, rinse water, and the cost of collecting and disposing of the dissolved grease and wash water.
- Downtime. What the kitchen loses while the line is out of service. Facilities that ignore this line consistently under-price duct cleaning and consistently over-value work they can do overnight.
Then divide the total by the square metres cleaned. Cost per square metre is the only figure that lets you compare a contractor who quotes by the metre against one who quotes by the job, and it is the figure you can carry from one site to another in a multi-site estate.
Where the cleaning method changes the number
Three method choices move the cost more than any price negotiation:
Soak time versus heat. A conventional approach applies chemical degreaser, leaves it to work, then rinses and scrubs. The dwell time and the rinsing are what consume the labour hours. High-temperature steam softens baked-on grease while it is being applied, so the operator moves to the next panel instead of waiting. On central kitchen degreasing work, the saving shows up in the labour line and in fewer passes, not in the consumables line.
Water volume and cleanup. Pressure-washing a kitchen produces litres of greasy runoff that has to be swept to a drain, contained, or handled as waste. Low-moisture steam leaves far less liquid behind, which cuts the mop-up time at the end of the shift and reduces the slip hazard while the rest of the kitchen is still working. If your site charges for wastewater handling or works where drainage is limited, this is a real line item rather than an environmental nicety.
In-house versus contracted. Buying a machine only pays off once your own crew has enough recurring work to use it. A unit rated for continuous duty, with a tank and element sized for a full service session, is justified when you clean the hood and cooking line on a fixed short cycle and can schedule duct work around production. If the ducts are cleaned once or twice a year by a specialist, an in-house machine earns nothing against those jobs.
A worked comparison you can copy
Set the sheet up in columns and fill the hours from your own logs. The rows below show the shape of it; the hours are the ones you record, and the rate is the one your site actually pays.
| Component | Work done | Cost lines to fill in |
|---|---|---|
| Hood canopy and filters | Wipe, degrease, rinse, refit filters | Labour hours, chemical, wastewater, downtime |
| Duct run and riser | Open panels, clean interior, close and seal | Access labour, contractor equipment, containment |
| Fan housing and impeller | Isolate, clean blades, check balance | Technician hours, downtime, any replacement parts |
| Cooking line and shielding | Steam and wipe surfaces at end of service | Operator hours, machine energy, machine depreciation |
Add a column for the interval each component currently gets. Cost per square metre per year is what falls out, and that is the number you use to argue for a shorter or longer cycle.
What a good quote should show you
Before signing, check that a contractor's price can be mapped onto the same four lines. A usable quotation states the surfaces covered, the access panels included, the hours assumed, whether extraction is taken down and refitted, and what happens to the removed grease. A price that covers "the kitchen extraction system" with no breakdown cannot be compared against anything, and it cannot be challenged when the work is rushed.
Keep one record per site: date, component, hours, method, and any defect found. After two or three cycles you have your own baseline, and that baseline is worth more than any published price list, because it reflects your layout, your menus and your crew.
Questions to settle before you buy equipment
If the sheet shows that hood and cooking-line cleaning dominates your spend, an in-house machine is worth evaluating. Ask the supplier these questions in writing, and get the answers in the specification:
- What steam temperature and pressure does the unit deliver at the nozzle, and can it run continuously through a full service session without cooling?
- What is the heating power and water tank capacity, and does the unit have dry-steam and wet-steam modes for different grease loads?
- Is the machine built for a fixed position in a kitchen environment, with the electrical protections and water inlet arrangements your site can actually provide?
- What service and spare-parts support exists in your region, and what is the warranty term on the heater and pump?
PowerDe, the Shenzhen-based intelligent cleaning equipment manufacturer, publishes the operating figures for its fixed steam unit rather than asking buyers to take a brochure claim: a 220 V machine with 6 kW heating power, steam at 160° and vapour pressure at 0.8 MPa, an 80 L tank in SUS304 stainless steel, dry and wet steam modes, and a vacuum function, with leakage, short-circuit, high-temperature, high-voltage and water-shortage protection listed on the product page. Read those numbers against your own kitchen's power supply, water connection and service access before you treat them as a fit.
Once you have component costs, a per-square-metre figure and two cycles of logged hours, the cost question answers itself. You will know which part of the ventilation system is expensive, which interval is paying for itself, and whether the machine on your list reduces labour hours or simply replaces one cost line with another.
