Inside the town, your authority is the Office of the Fire Marshal at the Cary Fire Department, at 316 N. Academy Street. It enforces the North Carolina Fire Prevention Code across Cary and its extraterritorial jurisdiction, and carries out more than 6,000 fire inspections a year.
Cary publishes its inspection cycle, and restaurants sit at the top of it: assembly occupancies are inspected annually, which covers any dining room seating fifty or more. Industrial and educational occupancies are inspected every two years — except public schools, which are twice a year — and business, mercantile and storage every three. If you run a restaurant in Cary, you are on the shortest fire-inspection cycle the town operates.
You also answer to a second inspector. Wake County Environmental Health & Safety states that restaurants are inspected one to four times a year, depending on menu items and food processes — so a scratch kitchen handling raw proteins sees an inspector far more often than a cafe reheating prepared food.
Two authorities, two records. The fire marshal is looking at your exhaust system and suppression; the health inspector is looking at the kitchen around it. NFPA 96 requires a certificate kept on the premises naming the servicing company, the person who performed the work and the date — Kitchen Guard leaves that certificate after every visit, with before-and-after photographs attached.
Cary’s kitchens keep very different hours — a Fenton dining room running late, a corporate campus cafe serving one lunch rush, a hospital production kitchen that never stops. We schedule NFPA 96 service to whichever clock your kitchen keeps.
From the hood filters to the rooftop fan, we clean the whole system and document it for both of the inspectors who walk through your door.
Our technicians work to NFPA 96 as the Office of the Fire Marshal at the Cary Fire Department enforces it. That includes the semi-annual servicing of the hood suppression system, and the certificate NFPA 96 requires you to keep on the premises naming the servicing company, the technician and the date.
Every visit produces before-and-after photographs of the canopy, plenum, duct run and rooftop fan, plus a dated certificate naming the servicing company, the technician and the date — the record NFPA 96 requires you to keep on the premises.
We are based in the Piedmont Triad and serve Cary on a scheduled route — 77 miles down I-40, about an hour and twenty minutes. Routed work is what makes overnight service practical, and it is how a Cary job gets priced and documented the same way a Cary one does.
We are available around the clock for questions about NFPA 96 compliance, scheduling, or an exhaust problem that cannot wait until morning.
Additionally, our experienced team specializes in commercial kitchen cleaning and ensures your exhaust hood and air vent cleaning are handled with precision.
Consequently, you stay informed with instant alerts about hood NFPA compliance, scheduled services, or emergency maintenance needs.
Our technicians, trained to NFPA 96 and ANSI/IKECA C10, clean the full exhaust system from top to bottom — hood canopy, filters, ductwork, and rooftop exhaust fan. We degrease the entire system with professional-grade agents, inspect for buildup and compliance concerns, and document every step with photos for your compliance file.
The Town of Cary runs its own Office of the Fire Marshal from 316 N. Academy Street, enforcing the North Carolina Fire Prevention Code across Cary and its extraterritorial jurisdiction and carrying out more than 6,000 fire inspections a year. Cary is unusually clear about how often it comes: annually for assembly, institutional, hazardous, high-rise and residential occupancies; every two years for industrial and educational, except public schools, which are twice a year; every three years for business, mercantile, storage and places of worship.
For most restaurants that means an annual visit — a dining room seating fifty or more is an assembly occupancy. Wake County Environmental Health handles sanitation separately, on a risk-based cycle running from once every year or two up to four times a year depending on your menu and processes, with an A at ninety points and permit revocation below seventy.
The Town of Cary runs its own sewer pretreatment programme rather than handing it to a regional authority, and it publishes the numbers:
The same rules reach businesses in Morrisville where Cary provides sewer. None of this is the same file as your exhaust system, but the operators who get caught out are usually the ones treating compliance as one thing rather than three.
After every service, we provide digital photo documentation and certified service stickers, and we send compliance reports to the Cary Office of the Fire Marshal on your behalf — so there is nothing to dig up when an inspector arrives.
NFPA 96 does not set a fixed cleaning calendar. Table 11.4 sets how often the system must be inspected, based on the type and volume of cooking, and the system must be cleaned whenever that inspection finds grease deposits:
Every Kitchen Guard service covers the complete exhaust path, not only the parts that are easy to reach.
we cover it all.
Fenton’s chef-driven dining rooms, the Chatham Street independents downtown, and the high-throughput chains at Crossroads and Parkside. A dining room seating fifty or more is an assembly occupancy, which puts it on Cary’s annual fire inspection — the shortest cycle the town runs. Wood-fired ovens are solid fuel and inspect monthly.
SAS Institute runs three cafes and multiple grab-and-go points on its Cary headquarters campus, and MetLife, Deutsche Bank, John Deere and the Weston and Regency office parks add more. Contract-managed dining with fixed service windows, and compliance files that get audited rather than glanced at.
Koka Booth Amphitheatre works eighty-plus events between April and October, then hosts the Chinese Lantern Festival through winter. WakeMed Soccer Park and the USA Baseball National Training Complex run their own seasons. Concession kitchens cook in short heavy bursts and then sit idle — the pattern that accumulates fastest and gets forgotten.
WakeMed Cary Hospital is the only full-service hospital in town, and its production kitchen cannot close. Add the assisted living and senior communities across western Wake County and you have the category with the strictest documentation requirements we handle. Phased overnight work keeps service running.
Cary High, Green Hope, Green Level and the rest of the Wake County schools in town, plus Cary Academy. The town inspects public schools twice a year — twice the rate of other educational occupancies — and the only sensible service window is the summer break.
The Umstead and its Herons kitchen, the Mayton downtown, and the hotel banquet lines along Weston Parkway and Cary Parkway. Banquet kitchens swing from idle to full output for a single booking, so grease load tracks events rather than covers — and the inspection standard is the same as any restaurant.
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GREENSBORO HOOD CLEANING FAQ
Below are common questions from Cary restaurant owners and food service operators about NFPA 96 hood cleaning compliance.
Our NFPA 96 certified team brings extensive expertise to every job. Additionally, we use commercial-grade cleaning solutions approved for kitchen exhaust systems. Furthermore, our technicians document every service with before-and-after photos. As a result, you have proof of compliance ready for any inspection. In addition, we schedule cleanings around your business hours to minimize disruption. Moreover, our service reports are formatted to meet insurance and fire marshal requirements. Consequently, our clients consistently pass fire department inspections on the first review.
The Town of Cary’s own Office of the Fire Marshal, within Cary Fire Department — 919-319-4575, with inspection scheduling on 919-469-4351. The office enforces the North Carolina Fire Prevention Code and runs the state-mandated inspection programme for commercial occupancies. Wake County’s fire marshal does not cover you: that office handles only unincorporated Wake plus Rolesville and Wendell, and directs every other municipality to its own fire prevention office.
For sanitation, yes. Most of Cary sits in Wake County and is inspected by Wake County Environmental Health and Safety on 919-856-5700. But Cary is one of four municipalities in Chatham County — parts of Amberly and Weldon Ridge sit inside the town limits but in Chatham — and those addresses are inspected by Chatham County Environmental Health in Pittsboro, 919-542-8208. Worth knowing which office holds your file before you need it.
Yes, and it is one of the few cooking styles the fire code names by hand. Wok cooking sits in the high-volume row alongside 24-hour cooking and charbroiling, which means a quarterly inspection interval rather than the six months a typical kitchen gets. That matters here more than almost anywhere in the Triangle — Cary is 20.4% Asian and 23.9% foreign-born by the most recent census estimates, well ahead of Raleigh and Durham, and the dining reflects it. High-heat wok work also aerosolises oil far more than a griddle does, so grease travels further up the duct.
Two sets of obligations running in parallel. The fire code sets your inspection interval by what you cook, and your landlord will usually specify a cleaning frequency and want evidence of it — Fenton is a 92-acre mixed-use development with restaurants, bars and a cinema sharing one site, so property management there takes documentation seriously. We schedule around centre trading hours and provide reports in a form a property manager accepts without a follow-up email.
Overnight, in the low-census window, usually in sections. WakeMed Cary Hospital runs 208 licensed beds and a kitchen that cannot close for an afternoon. Continuous cooking puts you in the code’s quarterly row rather than the six-month one, and we plan those visits around meal service rather than around our own schedule.
Yes, and intermittent use is deceptive. Koka Booth Amphitheatre is town-owned, seats 7,000 and runs more than 80 events a season from April through October, with the Chinese Lantern Festival alone drawing over 200,000 visitors in recent years. A concession kitchen that sits cold for three weeks then runs flat out for a sold-out night accumulates grease in bursts — and a system nobody has looked at since the last event is exactly the one that surprises people.
It turns on whether you have a commercial cooking hood, not on how ambitious the menu is. A light food and drink operation — the sort serving a park like Downtown Cary Park, seven acres and more than 750,000 visitors in its first year — may have no Type 1 hood at all, in which case the exhaust rules do not bite. The moment there is grease-producing equipment under a hood, you are in the same system as everyone else, just at the lighter end of the interval table.
Ask for the photographs, and specifically for the ones taken up the duct and at the fan. A hood that looks clean means the canopy and filters were done — the easy, visible part. The grease that causes fires sits in the horizontal duct run and around the rooftop fan, and it comes off with scrapers rather than a spray and a wipe. Every visit we do is photographed before and after at each access point including the roof, which is the only way to tell the difference from the floor of your kitchen.
