What you really pay for from your Kitchen Exhaust Cleaner

This job has just been completed the previous week.....

The only part of the system that was actually cleaned

was this outside of the exhaust fan

Looking at the intake of the fan on the rear system,

we see it was not tipped

back

Looking up from the fryer hood, we see only about 4 "

were actually cleaned

And when we stick the camera up the stack to look inside

the horizontal we see that not only was it never done

but there is proper access at the end of the duct as we

can plainly see in the far end

I just had a manager bring up an interesting point on value of a KEC (Kitchen exhaust cleaning) job. We were looking at a job that was just completed by a KEC company. As you can see in the pictures, only about 4 inches were cleaned up from the hood above a fryer system and about a foot down from the roof for the same system with none of the actual ductwork getting done on the other system. The fan screws were never removed or the fan tipped back. He said he paid about $400 for this cleaning. With over 20 feet of linear feet of ductwork both vertically and horizontally, he figures he paid about $400 per foot give or take a few dollars. By figuring apples to apples on the cleaning, he said the cost of cleaning the entire system by this company would be over $8000.00 at the "inexpensive rate" he had. There are many national. regional, and local KEC programs with per store pricing that seem like a good price but...... They may be inexpensive per store, but there are many that are in the thousands of dollars per foot range. Many of these restaurants are really getting "taken to the cleaners" or more literally "Taken BY the cleaners". He pointed out, that is what he is really paying for the cheap company is the $400 per foot when in reality $20-$40 per foot(depending on duct run and accessibility) is more in line that the quality companies end up charging for doing the system correctly for his particular concept. You cannot use a per foot price for bids of course as all systems are different, but it is a good analogy on value and why you need to inspect the cleanings and be very careful during the bid process on what you are getting for your money. This concept is not a large grease producer but you can see what happens after a few years when the inexpensive company skips areas. This store is only 4 years old. The manager said that the worst part is that they thought their system was safe from fire all this past 4 years that they were paying for this work every 6 months. He was not only "hosed" by the cleaning company, but could have been "hosed" again with the fire department attempting to put a grease fire out.