When a restaurant asks for a quote on cleaning its extraction system, the invoice almost never says “one job.” It lists the hood panels, the filters, the fan housing and the duct run as separate line items, priced by how many people it takes and how long they stay on site. That is why labor, not cleaning chemistry, usually decides the number. Comparing labor needs is therefore the most useful thing a purchasing team can do before it shortlists methods or machines.
The complication is that labor demand is driven by access, not by kitchen size. A single-restaurant kitchen with a short duct that can be reached from the roof and a second unit serving a food court through a long horizontal run will present the same hood face and require very different crew hours. Write down the reachability of each surface first, and the rest of the comparison becomes far easier to hold together.
Split the extraction system into four work zones
Crew hours behave differently in each zone, so they should be timed separately rather than averaged into one figure. The plenum and hood interior above the cooking line is the most accessible area, and usually the cheapest per square metre. The filters and grease cups are the most repetitive, because each one is handled by hand and returned to its slot. The fan and its housing add time for isolation and re-checking. The duct is where staffing changes most, since it depends on inspection hatch spacing, the length of each section, and whether a worker can physically reach the surface from outside.
Ask every supplier to break their estimate into those four zones. Two quotes that agree on the total can still disagree about where the people stand, and only the zone-level version shows you which scope you are actually buying.
Six variables that set the crew count
- Reachability. A crew working from a roof access or a service corridor spends far fewer hours than one laying protection, moving ladders and working under a suspended hood.
- Soil age. Fresh grease comes off a surface in minutes. Grease that has been heated and re-heated until it turns dark and hard behaves like a coating, and removing it is what turns a quick wipe into repeated passes.
- Disassembly. Time disappears into removing and refitting panels, filters and guards. Quote the crew count you need for a unit that is already open, and separately for the opening itself.
- Downtime window. A kitchen that must reopen at seven needs a bigger crew in a shorter shift, which raises both the headcount and the hourly cost.
- Runoff control. Every method that floods a surface needs someone managing containment and collecting the wash water, work that never appears on a price per square metre.
- Repeat passes. Scrub-and-rinse cycles are labour by definition, and they add time to both the surface and the floor beneath it.
Once those six items are on paper, the same sheet can be sent to every supplier, which is what makes the figures comparable.
What the method changes about the crew
Manual scraping and scrubbing concentrates the cost in hand time, so a larger crew shortens the job and a smaller one extends it almost proportionally. Water-jet work shifts time into setup, protection and runoff handling; fewer people may touch the surface, but the job rarely compresses as much as the headcount suggests, and the kitchen is wet for longer.
High-temperature steam sits in a different place in that picture. A central commercial kitchen degreasing machine such as the fixed PowerDe HW02 works on the hardened film rather than on the person holding the tool: its published figures are 6 kW heating power, 160 °C steam temperature and 0.8 MPa vapour pressure, with an 80 L SUS304 tank and dry or wet steam selection, and the same machine also carries a vacuum function. The labour consequence is not a shorter shift on day one, but the removal of scrub-and-rinse cycles, which is where crews otherwise spend most of their hours on a heavy-grease surface. That is the line to test in a trial: time one hood section with the current routine and one with the machine, and compare crew-hours rather than impressions.
Water volume points the same way. A hose-and-brush routine leaves the floor and the area below the equipment saturated, so cleaning the surroundings is part of the task. Steam is described on the manufacturer's site as a low-water approach, which trims the finishing work that a wet method adds afterwards. Where a kitchen has more than one hood, that difference repeats at every unit, and it is one of the few savings you can verify from a single job record.
Keep the record before the machine arrives
The comparison only holds if it is measured on your own site. Record start and finish times, the number of people on each zone, the surface area, and whether the duct was reachable from an inspection hatch. Three job records are enough to see which zone drives the cost, and they also show whether a commercial steam cleaning equipment purchase is justified by one hood or by a portfolio of them.
If your team operates several units, or if a food court, canteen or catering facility shares one duct system, bring the reachability drawing as well as the surface areas. Those two documents decide the crew count far more than the size of the cooking line does, and they let an equipment supplier such as PowerDe cleaning equipment advise on machine placement and access instead of guessing from a photograph. Shenzhen PowerDe Automation Precision Equipment states it was established in 2007, and it publishes its cleaning-equipment range with the technical parameters listed on each product page.
Before you send the enquiry
- Ask for zone-level crew hours, not one total for “the extraction system.”
- State the inspection hatch positions and the longest unreachable duct section.
- Say what downtime you have, since a night window sets the crew count before anything else does.
- Ask which scope item contains disassembly, refitting, runoff control and floor finishing.
- Confirm power supply and water access at the cleaning point before comparing any machine.
Two extraction systems of identical size can differ by a whole shift, and the difference almost always comes from access and from how long the grease has been left to harden. Measure the zones you can reach, compare crew-hours, and treat the cleaning method as the variable that changes those hours — not as the first thing you decide.
