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Most Exhaust Fires Start Where the Last Cleaner Stopped
A hood that looks clean tells you almost nothing. Grease travels, and it settles heaviest in the horizontal duct runs and the fan housing on your roof — the parts a partial cleaning never reaches, and the first parts a fire marshal checks when he opens an access panel.
Kitchen Guard of East Tennessee cleans the full system on every visit: canopy and baffle filters, the plenum behind them, the complete ducting network, and the exhaust fan itself. We use commercial-grade pressure washing equipment and clean to the NFPA 96 standard East Tennessee inspectors actually enforce. This is our core competency, not a side service.
When we’re finished you get before-and-after photographs and a service report for your compliance file — proof of the work, not just an invoice.
How Often Your Kitchen Actually Needs Service
NFPA 96 sets cleaning frequency by cooking volume, not by calendar convenience: monthly for solid-fuel cooking, quarterly for high-volume operations, semiannually for moderate-volume kitchens, and annually for low-volume kitchens like churches, seasonal venues, and day camps. A wood-fired oven in Knoxville and a café griddle in Chattanooga are not on the same schedule. We’ll tell you which one you’re on instead of defaulting everyone to quarterly and billing accordingly.
Hood cleaning is one part of keeping a kitchen inspection-ready. We also run a hood filter exchange so a saturated baffle never sits over your burners, handle commercial pressure washing for concrete floors and exterior surfaces, and take care of exhaust system repairs when a fan or hinge fails.
Where We Work
We serve commercial kitchens across East Tennessee: Chattanooga, Cleveland, Knoxville, Johnson City, Kingsport, Bristol and the wider Tri-Cities, along with Signal Mountain, Lookout Mountain, and St. Elmo. Our customers include restaurants, breweries, university campuses, hospitals, and municipal kitchens.
Hood Cleaning Questions East Tennessee Operators Actually Ask
Scheduling, cost, what actually gets cleaned, and what an inspector will ask to see.
NFPA 96 sets the interval by cooking volume, not by preference: monthly for solid-fuel cooking such as wood or charcoal, quarterly for high-volume kitchens, semiannually for moderate-volume kitchens, and annually for low-volume operations like churches, seasonal venues, and day camps. Those are minimums, not targets — a charbroiler running twelve hours a day can push a kitchen onto a shorter cycle than its category suggests. We assess the system before we set a schedule instead of putting everyone on quarterly and billing accordingly. The standard itself is summarized on our NFPA 96 page.
There is no honest flat rate, and any company quoting one sight-unseen is guessing. Cost depends on how many hoods you have, the length and complexity of the duct runs, how the rooftop fan is accessed, how much grease has built up since the last service, and how often you will be on the schedule. We look at the system first, then quote it — and the quote is what you pay, with no upcharges and no services you did not need. If you want the cost fixed in advance, we also build 24-month service plans matched to your NFPA 96 interval.
No. We work outside your service hours — overnight or early morning, whichever fits your operation — so the kitchen is ready for the next shift. The line needs to be cold and the equipment accessible, so we set the window with your kitchen manager when the job is booked. Time on site depends on the size of the system and how loaded it is, and you get that estimate with the quote rather than after we arrive.
All of it. Canopy and baffle filters, the plenum behind the filters, the full horizontal and vertical duct runs, every access panel along the way, and the exhaust fan on the roof. The duct runs and the fan are where grease actually accumulates, and they are exactly the parts a partial cleaning skips. If your system does not have enough access panels to reach a duct section properly, we will tell you — cleaning only what is easy to reach and calling it compliant is how a system that looks spotless from the kitchen floor still fails an inspection.
Because you can see it. Most of an exhaust system is somewhere you will never look — a duct run above the ceiling, or a fan housing on the roof — so “trust us” is not a standard. Every service produces before-and-after photographs of the sections you cannot inspect yourself: the plenum, the duct interior, the access points, and the fan. Those go into your service report with the date and the technician who did the work, and the hood gets a current cleaning label so an inspector can verify it without calling anyone.
Yes, on every visit and without being asked. You get HD before-and-after photographs, a written service report covering what was cleaned and who cleaned it, and an updated compliance sticker on the hood. Everything is delivered through an online client portal, so when a fire marshal, a health inspector, or your insurance carrier asks how the system is maintained, the record is already in hand instead of something you have to reconstruct.
Yes. Our technicians are certified, safety-trained, and W2 employees of Kitchen Guard — never subcontractors, so accountability for the work stays with us rather than shifting to a third party you never hired. Crews are fully insured and bonded, and we can provide a certificate of insurance before anyone sets foot on your roof. Ask any hood cleaner for one. If they cannot produce it, that is your answer.
Yes, and it is a different job. Wood and charcoal deposit creosote as well as grease, and NFPA 96 places solid-fuel appliances on a monthly interval with their own requirements for spark arrestors and dedicated flues. That matters in this market — Chattanooga and Knoxville have no shortage of wood-fired ovens, smokehouses and brewery kitchens. We break down what the standard actually asks for in our guide to solid fuel hood cleaning and spark arrestor filters.
Because it is the standard your fire marshal and your insurance carrier both work from, and they look at the same evidence. Falling behind can mean a failed inspection, a citation, an order to stop cooking until the system is brought back to standard, or a denied claim after a fire — and in a grease fire the loss is rarely limited to the kitchen. Compliance is not a certificate you frame once. It is a maintenance record that has to be current on the day somebody asks to see it.
Call us. We can usually get a crew out quickly to bring the system back to standard and re-document it for your file, which is what the inspector will want to see on the follow-up. If the failure is mechanical rather than grease — a seized fan, a damaged hinge, a missing or broken access panel — our exhaust repair service covers that too, so you are not coordinating two vendors against one deadline.
