Any commercial kitchen without a ventilation system will soon fall foul of its staff, customers, and several bodies of government legislation. Heat and air pollution are serious health problems that have knock-on effects too; fats in the air condense onto every surface in reach, discolouring them, attracting vermin, and increasing fire hazards. Water condensation alone will eventually rot window frames and anything else made of timber.
Operators often complain they lack the funds to install a proper ventilation system, but your real costs are higher if you don’t. Retaining top quality staff is hard when working conditions are insufferable on a regular basis. Customers are affected either directly (by heat and odours) or indirectly by staff absences and low morale. Your kitchen appliances are also degrading faster than they would in a controlled environment – fridges and freezers fail, electrical circuits burn out, and everything rusts faster.
The potential cost savings speak for themselves even if you’ve forgotten about the regulations, but here’s somewhere to start if you havehttps://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/cais10.htm.
Quick and nasty solutions
Fans and filters bring few real benefits. Fans are just moving bad air from one place to another. Air recirculated through a cooker hood takes very little time to overwhelm the filter. Cooker hood motors use a lot of electricity and generate a lot of noise, fraying everyone’s nerves even more.
Solutions that don’t work add to your costs. They become yet more things that are difficult, time-consuming and expensive to clean. By the time you factor in decoration, repairs, replacements, labour and staff losses it is hard to see how anyone can possibly be saving money by putting off a professional ventilation solution.
The best kitchen ventilation solution
Ducts offer the best solution. A type that is especially easy to install consists of spirally constructed tubing of galvanised or stainless steel – ideal for catering establishments. These ductwork parts are cheap, lightweight, and quick to install. With the correct ductwork parts and accessories these systems can be switched to expel heat in summer months or conserve energy bills by re-circulating properly filtered air in winter ones. You may even be able to direct surplus heat from the kitchen to warm your dining area – drastically reducing your current winter bills.
Everyone’s morale and creativity flourishes in a cool comfortable kitchen. Your customers will soon notice.
