In any kitchen that actually cooks, grease-laden vapour rises, cools against the hood, and hardens into a sticky film that never quite comes off with a wipe cloth. Left alone, that film becomes a fire load, a drip over the pass, and a finding on the next inspection. A written cleaning checklist is the simplest defence: it turns hood upkeep from something someone "usually does" into a routine with named tasks, set intervals, and a record that survives staff turnover.
Why the checklist has to be written down
Verbal routines break the moment a key cook or cleaner leaves. A checklist fixes four things on paper: what gets cleaned, how often, who is responsible, and what "clean" looks like when the job is done. It also gives facility managers a document to hand to a fire marshal, an insurer, or a franchisor auditor, instead of a story about how the hood "gets cleaned a lot."
What the checklist should cover
Grease travels the whole exhaust path, so the list should follow it from the cooking line to the roof:
- Hood interior and exterior surfaces, including the underside panels and the front valance
- Baffle filters, grease cups, and the grease trough with its drain path
- The exhaust fan or blower, its housing, and the fan wheel where it is reachable
- Ductwork from the hood to the exhaust discharge point
- Walls and ceilings within reach of the cooking line, where aerosolised grease settles
- A record section: date, task, responsible person, and any contractor paperwork
Set the frequency by how much you cook
A single interval does not fit every kitchen. The cleaning intervals commonly referenced in NFPA 96, the US standard for kitchen exhaust cleaning, scale with cooking volume:
- Solid-fuel cooking (wood, charcoal): monthly
- High-volume charbroiling or frying operations: quarterly
- Moderate-volume kitchens: twice a year
- Low-volume or seasonal operations: once a year
Treat those intervals as a floor, not a target. Filters tell you the truth sooner: if they are visibly loaded or airflow over the cook line has dropped, the deep clean is overdue regardless of the calendar.
Split the work into daily, weekly, and periodic tasks
Deep cleans are scheduled; surface upkeep is habitual. Keep the daily items short enough that closing staff will actually complete them:
- Daily: wipe the accessible hood surfaces and front valance, empty the grease cups, and check that nothing is blocking the filters.
- Weekly: remove the baffle filters and degrease them in a sink or wash area, and check the fan housing for surface grease.
- Periodic: book the duct and fan deep clean at the interval your cooking volume demands, and log the contractor's report.
Assign each line to a role, not to "the team." A checklist with owners gets done; a checklist with suggestions does not.
Where steam fits into degreasing
Polymerised kitchen grease resists hot water and detergent, which is why scrubbing filters is such a disliked job. High-temperature steam softens that hardened grease so it releases with far less scrubbing, and it does so with a fraction of the water and little or no chemical degreaser. For facilities building commercial kitchen steam cleaning into the weekly filter task, a fixed machine plumbed to a water line is usually the practical starting point.
As an example of what to look for in the specification, PowerDe's fixed steam cleaning machine HW02 runs on 220 V mains power and ordinary tap water, produces steam at 160 °C with a 0.8 MPa vapour pressure, holds its water in an 80-litre stainless steel tank, and switches between dry and wet steam. When comparing commercial steam cleaning equipment, check steam temperature and pressure first: those two numbers decide whether a machine breaks down grease or merely wets it.
Document the work so it survives the audit
A checklist without records is a checklist without proof. For every completed task, note the date, the person who did it, and one before-and-after photo of the filters or hood interior. Keep contractor invoices and duct-cleaning reports in the same folder, whether it hangs on a hook in the kitchen office or lives in a shared drive. When an inspector asks when the hood was last cleaned, the answer should take under a minute to find.
Start with one page
The best checklist is the one that fits on a single laminated page and stays by the hood: daily wipes, weekly filters, periodic deep clean, records kept. Once that page is running smoothly, upgrade the tools around it. For facilities that want help matching a machine to their wash area and workload, PowerDe cleaning equipment can be specified directly through the company's engineering team.
