A request for equipment to clean one appliance is easy to answer. A range, a griddle or a hood sits in one place, has one set of surfaces, and can be isolated on its own, so a supplier can read the description and name a machine.
A cooking line is a different question. A line is a row of equipment that runs in a fixed order: prep benches, ranges and bratt kettles, a griddle, fryers, a steamer bank, the pass, and a pot wash at the end of it, with services running along one side and a floor that carries everything falling off the last metre of it. Whoever supplies equipment for it is not only choosing a machine. They are choosing where that machine will stand, how far the work has to reach from the point it is allowed to stand, how often the crew will walk back for water, and whether the sequence of cleaning fits into the hours the line is genuinely free.
Most enquiries send one third of that: a description of the soil and a hope about the machine. The quote comes back with a credible temperature and a hose that stops two stations short. What follows is the information that changes the answer, and most of it is information about your line rather than about the equipment.
A line asks for three decisions, not one
When the target is a cooking line, the supplier is making three decisions at once:
- what touches each surface: the heat, the amount of water, the steam mode, the tool
- how the work reaches the far end of the line: positions, hose and lance lengths, refills, the gaps between units
- when the work can happen: which parts of the line can be stopped, in what order, and how much time is left once cooling and drying are counted
The first decision is the one people write about in an enquiry. The second and third are the ones that decide whether the equipment gets used. A machine that cannot reach the furthest station from any position your floor allows is not a cleaning tool; it is a piece of equipment stored in a cupboard.
This is also why two quotes for the same words, "degreasing for the cooking area", can differ by more than you would expect. One supplier has assumed a single position and one stoppage of the whole line. The other has assumed three positions and section-by-section work. Neither answer is wrong; they were given two different lines. The same ambiguity wrecks a central kitchen degreasing schedule when the scope is written as a room instead of a sequence of stations with different windows.
Walk the line in production order
The most useful document you can send a supplier is a station sheet, and the only reliable way to produce one is to walk the line from end to end in the order the food moves through it, with a tape measure and a notebook, at the end of a shift while the surfaces are still warm. Cold, clean equipment tells you almost nothing.
Write one row per station. Five columns matter.
- Surfaces and materials. Stainless cladding, painted panels, laminated edges, rubber door and hatch seals, decals and nameplates, glass-ceramic hob tops, tiled splash zones, epoxy floor and skirting. Each behaves differently under heat and water, and a supplier who knows what your line is made of can tell you which mode to use where.
- Soil state, not "grease". A fresh oil film from the last service lifts with warmth and a short dwell. The same oil baked all day behind a splash guard and around control knobs has polymerised and needs sustained heat and several short passes rather than one long one. Boil-overs that have carbonised are a solid first and a film second: scrape before applying any heat method. A line carries all three states at once, and the mixture, not the average appearance of the room, is the specification.
- What must stay dry. Burner ports, gas valves, igniters and thermocouples on open-flame equipment; heating elements, junction boxes and thermostat connections on electric equipment; control panels, cable glands, nameplates and the seams behind them; anything with a laminated edge or an adhesive bond.
- Distance to services. The nearest socket and which circuit it sits on, the nearest tap and its thread, the nearest drain or gutter, and the route a hose would actually take along the floor rather than the straight line on a drawing.
- When it can be stopped, and for how long. Some stations are free only after production ends. Some can be sectioned off while the rest of the line keeps cooking. Some are touched by two different teams in two different shifts and belong to neither.
Then add the two rows nobody thinks to record: the floor and gutters that run the length of the line, and the pot wash, which is usually a different team, a different window and a different drain even though it sits at the end of the same room.
The line-level facts a station list does not produce
A station list describes parts. A line has properties that only appear when the parts are looked at together, and a supplier needs all of them:
- The stoppage pattern. Can the whole line be stopped at once, or only in sections? Who authorises it, and at what time does that actually happen? Write the window as the interval between the last pan coming off the line and the first tray going back on it, not as the shift pattern on the rota.
- The order of cleaning. Working with the production order and against it are two different jobs. Most crews work from the cleanest end toward the dirtiest, and toward the drain, so that nobody walks through work already finished. Say which you intend, because it changes the number of positions and the length of hose.
- Positions and reach. Put the machine where the floor will genuinely let it stand, then measure with a tape to the furthest station you expect it to serve. That figure is the specification. If the furthest point is out of reach, the honest options are a second position, a longer lance, or removing that station from the scope. A longer hose wound around a trolley is not a fourth option.
- Services along the line. Sockets, taps and drains are usually clustered at the ends of a line rather than distributed along it. A machine that must stand near water has its working radius set by somebody's plumbing. If the only drain is under the pot wash, then the pot wash is in your scope whether or not anyone intends to clean it.
- Where water goes on the floor. Slope, low points, gutters and expansion joints decide where warm, greasy run-off travels and where it cools and drops its load again, which is often several metres from where anyone was spraying.
- What can be moved. Equipment on casters can be pulled forward and the space behind it reached. Equipment bolted to plinths cannot, and the gap behind it becomes a standing limitation rather than a surprise discovered on the first night.
- Who does the work. Which crew, on which shift, and whether they are the people who know which panels are worth arguing about. A plan written for a different team than the one you have will fail quietly rather than loudly.
Send this as one page: the line seen from above, stations marked, candidate positions marked, measured distances written in, taps, drains and circuits marked, and the stoppage window written next to each group of stations. A badly drawn page is worth more than a well-written paragraph of adjectives.
Reading an equipment table as line inputs
Once the line is described, a specification table becomes readable in a useful way, because each line of it answers a question about your layout. Take the PowerDe HW02 fixed machine as a worked example, since its published figures show what each row is actually describing.
The page lists a steam temperature of 160 degrees Celsius and a vapour pressure of 0.8 MPa. On a saturated machine those are two readings of one condition rather than two separate capabilities, and the question that matters is where they were measured: at the boiler end or at the nozzle end. Down a long hose running the length of a cooking line, what arrives at the surface is not what left the machine. Ask for the nozzle-end figure and compare candidates on that basis.
The 6 kW heating power and the 80 L stainless steel tank describe a work cycle: how long the machine can run before it needs water and reheating. On a line that arithmetic belongs to each position. Add the walk back to the tap, and you have the real duration of the task, which is usually the number your rota cannot absorb. The 1/2-inch tap-water inlet decides how far from a water supply the machine may stand, which is a layout decision made in your building, not an accessory chosen by the supplier.
The 220 V supply needs a circuit checked by your own electrician at the position the machine will occupy, not somewhere near the kitchen door. The footprint of 1,200 x 800 x 1,200 mm including handles is the machine, not the space it needs: check it against the aisle along the line, the gaps between appliances, the door it arrives through, and the clearance a person needs to reach a valve, a filter or a tank drain.
The switch between dry and wet steam is a decision made station by station rather than a setting chosen once. Dry steam carries less free water and belongs near control panels, cable entries, ignition components and any surface that must be back in service before the next shift starts. Wet steam carries more heat and more water and belongs where the deposit is heavier and where run-off can be seen, guided and dried within the same shift. Dry steam still condenses on metal below its dew point, so the mode changes what you add, not what the room generates by itself.
The built-in protections on this class of machine, listed on the page as leakage, short-circuit, high-temperature, high-pressure, water-shortage and high-voltage-explosion protection, protect the machine and the person holding the lance when something fails. They do not rate your circuit, they do not notice that your floor is wet, and a low-water stop is a scheduling event rather than a fault. Ask in writing for the four numbers the page does not publish: hose and lance lengths, preheat time from cold, working time per tank, and how quickly the machine recovers after a refill. Those four turn a plan into an honest one.
What a complete quote for a line should contain
Compare candidates on one page, and expect a quote for a line to carry more than a quote for a single appliance:
- a station-by-station scope: what is included, what is excluded, and the reason for each exclusion
- the reach plan: how many positions, where each one sits, and the hose and lance lengths that serve them
- the steam mode and tool recommended for each group of stations, with the surface limits stated
- a phasing proposal: which two stations to start with, and what evidence would justify extending to the rest
- written answers on every figure the catalogue does not publish
- consumables with part names, prices and expected replacement intervals, plus who responds when the machine is down and within how many hours
- an explicit statement of what the machine does not do: the inside of a duct beyond the first reachable metre, an interceptor that needs emptying, the oil circuit inside a fryer, and the wash-and-sanitise routine on food-contact surfaces. A sanitisation result is something your own food-safety system verifies; it is not a property of a machine.
If a quote arrives as a machine, a price and a paragraph, the supplier has quoted a catalogue rather than your line. Send the station sheet back and ask for it filled in.
Test one station before committing to the line
Nobody has to clean a whole kitchen to find out whether commercial kitchen steam cleaning belongs on your line. Choose one station with a typical deposit: not the worst panel in the building, and not the one facing the dining room.
Before anything is switched on, write the acceptance wording in language two people can check: no visible film under a raking light on the treated half; the agreed white cloth passes along two marked edges; no standing water in seams and handle cut-outs when viewed at a low angle. Run a strip of tape down the middle of the panel and treat one half only, so that the untreated half answers the question of whether the method worked or the crew was simply rushed.
Fix the distance and the number of passes for the first round, then change one variable at a time. Photograph the same reference points from the same angle. Time the whole task, including preheat, masking, refills, drying and the final wipe. Come back the next morning, because water collects in seams and low points overnight and bare metal that has lost its oil film shows rust hours later rather than minutes.
Then decide station by station rather than kitchen by kitchen. A line nearly always ends up as a scope statement rather than a verdict: wet steam here, dry steam there, mechanical removal first on the boil-over panels, and one or two surfaces left to another method entirely. That is a usable result. A single sentence about whether the kitchen "worked" is not, and it is the sentence that causes a machine to be bought and then ignored.
Send the record, not the summary
The difference between a quote you can act on and a quote you have to test twice is what you attach to the enquiry: the station sheet, the one-page line sketch with measured distances, the stoppage windows, the services you have and the services you do not, and the acceptance wording you intend to hold the work to. A supplier who receives that quotes the line you actually run. A supplier who receives the words "a commercial kitchen, very greasy" quotes whatever is in stock.
If you are assessing commercial steam cleaning equipment for a cooking line, send the sketch and the measurements with your questions about reach, nozzle-end figures and surface coverage, and get the answers in writing before anything is ordered. To open that conversation, contact PowerDe with your station sheet and your line layout, and the discussion starts from your equipment rather than from a catalogue.
