07404 434534

Commercial kitchen extraction · South East England

Commercial Kitchen Extraction Repair, Cleaning & Installation

Extraction stopped? Call us and we'll give you an arrival window before you hang up. Kitchens don't wait. Neither do we.

24/7 Emergency Callout

What is commercial kitchen extraction?

Commercial kitchen extraction is the system that pulls heat, steam and grease-laden air off the cooking line and out of the building: the canopy, the grease filters, the ductwork and the extract fan. It has to keep the kitchen workable, stay clean enough not to be a fire risk, and satisfy the gas interlock that holds the appliances on.

What we do

  • Repair

    Fan failure, ductwork damage, canopy faults. We fix most of them on the first visit.

    From £199 +VAT

  • Clean

    Grease measured before and after the clean, with photographs and a written record for your insurer.

    From £350 +VAT

  • Install

    Canopy, ductwork, fan and filtration, sized from your appliance line and built to DW172.

    No survey fee

  • Maintain

    Fixed-schedule contracts. We book the next visit before we leave.

    From £385 +VAT a year

Why does commercial kitchen ventilation stop working?

Nearly always in one of four places, and rarely the one people expect.

  1. 01

    The fan

    Bearings and belts wear on a schedule you can almost predict, which is why a service visit catches them cheaper than a callout does.

  2. 02

    The filters

    Loaded filters choke airflow across the whole system, and the symptom shows up somewhere else entirely.

  3. 03

    The ductwork

    Grease narrows the run gradually. Nobody notices until the kitchen starts holding smoke.

  4. 04

    The gas interlock

    When this trips, it is usually telling the truth about one of the three above.

    How the interlock works

What the symptom usually means

People describe what the kitchen is doing, not what the fault is called. Each description below usually turns out to be one particular thing. None of them is a diagnosis: they are what an engineer checks first when you say it on the phone.

What callers describe, and what it usually turns out to be
What you say What we look at first
The fan has stopped Power and isolator first, then the motor, bearings and drive belt.
The fan runs but the light is on and nothing moves Usually the drive: a slipped or broken belt, or a failed coupling.
The fan will not switch off Control and interlock wiring rather than the fan itself.
It is not pulling the smoke away Loaded filters, a grease-narrowed duct run, or too little make-up air.
It has gone noisy, or it vibrates Bearings, an out-of-balance impeller, or loose mountings.
The gas interlock keeps tripping Airflow proving. Four of the five common causes sit on the ventilation side.
There is a smell, or the kitchen is too hot Extract volume against make-up air, and how much grease is in the run.

The pattern worth noticing is that the fan is named in most calls and is the fault in a minority of them. Airflow problems present at the fan because that is where the noise is. How a repair visit works.

Who we work with

Different kitchens, same four failures, across South East England.

  • Restaurants

    Long service periods on a fixed appliance line. The grease load is predictable, which makes the cleaning interval predictable too.

  • Pubs and bars

    A fryer and a grill doing most of the work, often in a kitchen fitted into a building that was never meant to have one.

  • Hotels

    Breakfast and dinner peaks with a long quiet middle, and a duct run that usually travels further than anyone expects.

  • Schools

    Heavy use in a short window, then holidays. The system ages by term rather than by month, and faults surface on the first day back.

  • Care homes

    Cooking runs all day at a lower intensity and the kitchen cannot stop, so work is planned around service rather than dropped into it.

  • Dark kitchens

    Several operators sharing one extract system and running longer hours than a restaurant. The heaviest grease load we see, and the least clear ownership.

The system is the same in all of them. What changes is what it is up against, and that is what decides how often anyone should be looking at it.

Every kitchen we work in Areas we cover All our services

How we work

Four commitments, and the thing each one rules out.

Engineers employed by us
Not sub-contracted
An arrival window given on the call
Not a half-day slot
A price agreed before work starts
Not after
Parts you hear about on the visit
Not in the invoice afterwards

Scope Gas work is Gas Safe registered work and we do not carry it out. Everything on the ventilation side, we do.

Four questions, with the sources under them

01

Do I need extraction in a commercial kitchen?

In practice, yes. A commercial kitchen puts out heat, steam and grease-laden air that has to be taken out mechanically for the room to stay workable and for the grease not to accumulate somewhere it can burn. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 the responsible person for the premises has to carry out a fire risk assessment and take reasonable fire precautions.

Not legislation

No law names a specification for a kitchen extract system. DW/172 and TR19 Grease are industry specifications, and any page telling you otherwise has not read them.

Asked for by name

They are what an insurer or an environmental health officer asks for, and a grease-laden extract system is one of the things a fire risk assessment has to account for.

The two specifications are what shows the system was designed and maintained by someone competent, which is reason enough to work to them. What DW172 requires.

02

What does commercial kitchen extraction cost?

Starting points, not quotes. Every one of them moves with the size of the system and the number of appliances under the canopy.

  • Repair callout

    from£199

    +VAT

  • Extract cleaning

    from£350

    +VAT

  • TR19 duct cleaning

    from£495

    +VAT

  • Maintenance contract

    from£385

    +VAT a year

  • Installation

    Survey first

    No figure published

Most repair faults are fixed on the first visit. Installation is quoted after a survey and no figure is published on this site: the ranges in circulation for a supply and install contradict each other by a factor of ten, and measuring your kitchen is a better use of an hour than repeating somebody else's number. Ask for a quote.

03

Extraction or ventilation: what is the difference?

Extraction

The half that takes air out.

  • Canopy
  • Grease filters
  • Ductwork
  • Extract fan

Ventilation

The whole exchange: the extract plus the make-up air that replaces what leaves. The two have to be sized together.

  • Canopy
  • Filtration
  • Ductwork
  • Fan
  • The air coming back in

A system that extracts hard without enough make-up air will pull air from wherever it can find it, hold the room in negative pressure, drag smells through the building and make the doors difficult to open. Most people searching for commercial kitchen ventilation mean the whole system rather than the fan, and that is the level we work at.

What is make-up air?

Make-up air is the air brought into the kitchen to replace what the extract takes out. Air that leaves has to be replaced from somewhere, and if nobody has designed where, the building decides: gaps around doors, the dining room, the cellar, a flue.

The same volume leaves both kitchens. On the right, nobody decided where the replacement comes from, so the building decides.

It is the most common thing missing from a system that looks correct on paper. A canopy sized properly, a fan sized properly, and no thought given to the supply side, so the whole thing underperforms and the fan gets blamed. Where a system runs demand control, DW/172 also expects a background ventilation rate to be held rather than allowing the extract to wind down to nothing. What DW172 covers.

How it shows up in the room

  • Cold draughts on the pass
  • Smells in the dining room
  • Doors that are hard to open
  • Extraction that seems weak

The last one is why the first thing an engineer checks is rarely the part the caller suspects: extraction that seems weak is often an air supply problem rather than a fan problem. How we diagnose it.

04

How often does an extract system need cleaning?

It depends on how many hours a day the kitchen cooks. BESA publishes these as baseline intervals by daily cooking hours.

  1. 3

    months

    Longest cooking day

  2. 6

    months

    In between

  3. 12

    months

    Shortest cooking day

Those are starting points and not rules: they are subject to a competent person conducting a cleanliness risk assessment. A fast food kitchen running sixteen hours a day and an office servery doing lunches are not on the same schedule, and we measure grease thickness rather than guess at it. How the cleaning works.

Sources

  • Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005: legislation.gov.uk. Checked 15 August 2026.
  • Kitchen extract system cleaning, baseline intervals and grease thickness: BESA. Checked 15 August 2026.
  • Prices are the ranges observed in live UK search results on 13 August 2026, and are starting points rather than quotes.

Worth reading before you book

All kitchen extraction guides

Kitchen stopped?

07404 434534

Any hour, any day. An arrival window before you hang up.

24/7 Emergency Callout