When a restaurant gets busy, the exhaust ducts are usually the last thing anyone inspects. Grease moves upward with the cooking vapour, settles on the inside of the hood, and then keeps travelling along the duct run until it reaches the fan and the discharge point. A checklist keeps that work scheduled and visible instead of leaving it to whoever happens to have spare time at closing. Below is a practical way for a kitchen team to build one that fits its own operation.
Start with what you actually have
Before writing any tasks, walk the whole extraction path and list every component on it. Most kitchens need a line for the hood canopy and filters, the duct sections, the fan housing and blades, the vertical riser or roof discharge, and the make-up air louvres. Then add the cooking equipment directly underneath: range, grill, fryer, and the flat surfaces and backsplashes around them. A checklist copied from another site often misses half of this, because duct routing differs from one building to the next.
Write the location for each item in plain words your staff will recognise, such as “duct above the grill, north wall”. Two people reading the same line should know exactly which part is meant.
Separate the daily, weekly and monthly tasks
Different parts of the system collect grease at different speeds, so the checklist works better in three tiers rather than one long list.
- Daily: wipe hood surfaces, sump and visible filter frames; empty grease cups; check that the fan still moves air properly.
- Weekly: remove and clean the baffle filters, wash the nearby walls and splash zones, and inspect the accessible duct opening for fresh buildup.
- Monthly or quarterly: open inspection ports, check the fan blades and the roof discharge, and record how thick the deposits have become so the next cleaning date can be set from what you see rather than from a fixed calendar.
Assign each tier to a named role. A line that says “clean” with no owner is the line most often skipped.
Write down the method, not just the task
Scrubbing a filter with a brush and cold detergent takes time and still leaves a film on warm metal. Teams that switch to commercial kitchen steam cleaning usually find the grease softens quickly once hot steam contacts it, which shortens the effort on hoods, filters and nearby equipment surfaces. If your team uses steam, put the method on the checklist itself, together with the practical details: which mode to use for a heavily coated surface, which nozzle to fit, and what to place under the work area to catch the run-off. The fixed Fixed Steam Cleaning Machine PowerDe HW02 runs on a 220 V supply, delivers steam at 160 °C with an 80 L SUS304 tank, and switches between dry and wet steam, so a written note on which mode suits which surface keeps results consistent between shifts.
Add a record the next inspection can use
A checklist that produces no record is hard to improve. Add three columns to every line: date, initials, and a short note on condition. Photographs of the interior of the duct at each monthly inspection make the record far more useful, because the change in deposit thickness over six months tells you more than any general guideline. Keep the completed sheets with the fan and filter purchase records in one folder, so the maintenance history of the extraction system sits in one place.
Decide who does the work you cannot reach
Long horizontal runs, roof-mounted fans and risers with no inspection port normally fall outside what an in-house team can reach safely. Note those items on the checklist anyway, with the name of the contractor and the date of their last visit, so nothing is assumed to have been done. Keep your own monthly observations beside the contractor reports; the two documents together give a much clearer picture of how fast the system loads with grease.
Review the checklist after the first month
Compare what the team actually completed with what the sheet asked for. Tasks that nobody finishes are usually either unnecessary or badly described, and items that fill up quickly need a shorter interval. If the buildup rate on your cooking equipment is higher than expected, customized steam cleaning equipment matched to your hood layout and shift pattern may be worth discussing, particularly where the same crew also handles floors and equipment surfaces outside the kitchen.
