Canopy, baffle filters, plenum, grease duct, extract fan and discharge point, cleaned end to end for restaurants, cafes, cloud kitchens, hotels, staff canteens and catering facilities. Written quote first.
Exhaust hood cleaning follows the grease from where it is produced to where it leaves the building:
Supply-side ductwork serving the same kitchen can be included or handled separately as AC duct cleaning.
Cooking vapour is fat carried in hot air. It cools as it travels, condenses inside the extract system, and hardens into a layer that thickens every service. That layer is combustible, and it lines a sealed path running from directly above your burners, through the fabric of the building, to the roof.
A flare-up on a wok range or a char grill is normal while it stays in the pan. The problem is a flame reaching a coated filter bank or plenum and finding continuous fuel above it. A duct fire is fast, hard to reach, and it travels where the duct goes, which in a tower or hotel is past floors that have nothing to do with the kitchen. Suppression over the range does not help you inside the duct.
The second risk is administrative. Food safety and fire and life safety in Dubai are administered by Dubai Municipality and Dubai Civil Defence respectively, and kitchen extract maintenance can fall within what either looks at. Your own food safety scheme, your landlord and your insurer may each set their own expectations, so check your own licence conditions. The technical standard most widely referenced in this trade internationally is NFPA 96, the Standard for Ventilation Control and Fire Protection of Commercial Cooking Operations.
We will not tell you what your specific obligation is, because that is set by the authority and your licence conditions, not by a contractor's website. NFPA 96, the standard most referenced internationally, does publish an inspection schedule banded by how hard the kitchen works, and your own scheme or insurer may point at it. What matters is that you hold a dated record of what was cleaned and its condition, so that when somebody asks you have evidence rather than an assurance. The record we provide on your contract is set out in your written quotation.
"We had the hood cleaned last month" very often means somebody pulled the baffle filters, put them through a sink, and polished the stainless the staff can see. The kitchen looks better next morning and nothing that matters has changed.
Filters are a grease removal device, not a seal. They catch a proportion of the fat, not all of it. Everything they miss goes past them into the plenum, the spigot and the duct, which is exactly the part nobody can see and nobody has cleaned.
A kitchen exhaust cleaning job is judged on what came off the parts you cannot see. If a contractor cannot show you the inside of the plenum, the duct at an access panel and the fan blades, before and after, you paid for filter cleaning and a polish.
Regular filter cleaning between full visits is good practice, and plenty of operators run their filters through a dishwasher or soak tank weekly. That is a sensible habit. It is not a substitute for the canopy cleaning and grease duct cleaning that keeps the system safe.
An access panel is a bolted, sealable opening in the ductwork that lets a technician get a hand, a brush and a camera inside. Without them a duct can only be cleaned from each open end, which on a long run means most of it is never touched.
Dubai has a lot of kitchen ductwork with no access at all, either because the original fit-out treated the duct as a sealed pipe or because panels were plated over in a later refurbishment. When we find this we tell you plainly and set out the options:
Ceilings and service voids sometimes have to be opened to reach a duct. We say so before we start rather than after, and making good forms part of the quote.
These are two different services, and they get confused when quotes are compared.
An AC duct clean removes dust, construction debris and microbial growth from supply and return air ducts. It is about the air you breathe and how well your cooling performs. That is covered on our AC duct cleaning page, and it pairs with AC coil cleaning and what is actually in the air.
Kitchen duct cleaning on the extract side removes flammable fat from the grease duct. Different soiling, different chemicals, different equipment, different risk. A cheap quote is sometimes cheap because it has been priced as an air duct job on a grease duct system.
Most kitchens need both, on different cycles.
The kitchen is a food production area, and the method has to respect that.
Protection first. Cooking surfaces, prep benches, fryers, open food areas and floor drains are sheeted and taped before anything is opened.
Isolation. The extract fan is switched off and locked out at the isolator. Nobody works on an impeller another member of staff can start.
Filters out. Filters are soaked in a heated degreasing solution rather than scrubbed dry, which is faster and does less damage to the mesh.
Chemical application. Alkaline degreasers suited to food premises are applied to the canopy interior, plenum, spigot and duct surfaces and left to work. Dwell time is what removes hardened grease. Scraping alone leaves a film, and aggressive scraping damages the duct.
Agitation. Brushes, scrapers and rotary tools where the geometry allows.
Wash down and rinse. Water is captured and disposed of rather than pushed into your floor gullies. Fat entering a drain moves the problem downstream, which is why heavy kitchens also need periodic drain cleaning.
Reassembly and test. Panels resealed, filters refitted, lighting reconnected, fan restarted, airflow checked at the canopy face, kitchen left ready for service.
The fan is where the system either works or quietly gives up, and it is the part left out of most cheap hood cleaning service quotes.
Grease builds unevenly on an impeller. As the coating thickens the rotating assembly goes out of balance, which produces vibration. Vibration destroys bearings, loosens fixings, cracks welds and eventually takes the fan out entirely, usually in the middle of a busy week. A fouled impeller also moves far less air than it should, so the canopy stops capturing and smoke rolls out from under the front lip.
While we are at the fan we clean the housing, blades and impeller, and check the things that are cheap to catch early:
Findings go into the report. Repairs are quoted separately and carry the workmanship warranty stated in that quotation. Where the fan sits on a planned schedule with the rest of the plant, this check belongs alongside commercial maintenance.
Extraction only works if the air being pulled out is replaced. Every cubic metre leaving through the canopy has to come back from somewhere.
When extract exceeds supply, the kitchen and then the whole unit goes negative. The signs are familiar: entrance doors heavy to open or slamming shut, whistling around door frames, air dragged in from the corridor or car park, cooking smell arriving in the dining room instead of leaving through the roof, and a canopy that no longer captures because it cannot pull.
The usual causes are a make-up air unit switched off to save energy, a supply system with blocked filters, an extract fan running at the wrong speed, or a fit-out where supply was never sized against extract.
We check the supply side as part of the visit, because cleaning the extract on a kitchen starved of make-up air fixes half the problem. Where the fault is in the cooling and fresh air plant it moves across to AC maintenance or AC repair, and in larger buildings to chiller and AHU servicing.
There is no single correct interval, and anyone who gives you one before seeing your kitchen is guessing. Four things decide it.
What you cook. The biggest factor by a wide margin. A charcoal grill, a shawarma rotisserie, a wok range or a busy fryer bank loads a duct with grease and carbon far faster than a bakery, a sandwich counter or a coffee shop. Two units in the same building on the same hours can need completely different schedules.
How much you cook. Covers per service, and services per day. A kitchen running continuously from noon to two in the morning fouls at several times the rate of one doing a single sitting.
Hours of operation. Seven days against five changes the arithmetic more than operators expect.
How the system is built. A short, straight duct with a well-sized canopy behaves differently from a long run with several bends, an undersized canopy and a fan that has never been balanced.
The practical approach is to clean, look at what came out, and set the interval from evidence. We would rather put you on a cycle you keep than sell you a frequency you cancel. Where you want it fixed and budgeted, kitchen hood cleaning can sit inside a planned maintenance contract, and our maintenance packages set out how that works.
The record is a large part of what you are buying. A report worth keeping contains:
The section on what was not reachable matters most when something goes wrong. A report claiming a whole system was cleaned when three metres of it had no access is worse than useless: it says the risk was handled when it was not.
If that is the standard of record you want on your system, send us photographs of the canopy and, if you can reach it, the duct at any access panel, and we will tell you what your system is likely to need.
Nobody cleans a canopy over a live pass. The work needs the equipment cold, the fan isolated and the area sheeted, so it happens outside service: overnight after close, early morning before prep, on a closed day, or during a shutdown between concepts.
Tell us your trading pattern when you call, including your latest close and earliest prep start, and we will build the visit around your service rather than our convenience.
Multi-operator kitchens have a problem a standalone restaurant does not: the duct is shared.
In a cloud kitchen block or a food court, several units frequently discharge into one common riser and one fan. The grease in that riser is the sum of everybody's cooking and it is nobody's individual responsibility. A single high-output tenant on a grill concept can foul a shared riser for the whole building, and the operators upstream carry the same risk as the one causing it.
The workable line: individual canopies, filters and branch ducts belong to the tenant, the common riser, main duct and fan to the building. We work either side of it, tenant kitchens for operators and shared risers, main runs and roof plant for landlords and facilities teams, with a report each party can hold.
Hotels, staff canteens and catering facilities behave similarly. Multiple kitchens, banqueting extract that only loads heavily during events, and a maintenance team that needs the whole site on one schedule rather than a series of separate call-outs. That normally sits inside a wider property maintenance arrangement.
Cleaning restores a system that is fundamentally sound. Sometimes it is not, and saying so is part of the job.
We handle grease duct fabrication in our own workshop and install the replacement ductwork ourselves, covered under duct installation, and we handle extract design when a kitchen is rebuilt as part of a kitchen renovation or a commercial fit-out. Warranty terms for your job are confirmed in the written quotation.
If cleaning will do, we will clean it. We are not going to sell you a duct replacement to avoid a difficult job.
Domestic extractor hood cleaning is a much smaller job and it is worth doing. A villa or apartment range hood collects grease on its mesh filters, in the housing and in the short duct behind it. When those filters clog the hood stops pulling, cooking smell moves into the living space and settles into soft furnishings, and the motor works harder than it needs to. Recirculating hoods with carbon cartridges do nothing at all once the cartridge is saturated.
We clean domestic hoods, filters and accessible ducting, and check that the discharge actually reaches outside rather than venting back into a ceiling void, which is a common finding in older apartments. It is usually combined with a kitchen deep clean or a general maintenance visit rather than booked on its own.
If your kitchen smells long after the cooking has finished, the hood is the first thing to look at. For commercial kitchens ready to book, send your trading hours and canopy count and we will schedule the clean out of hours.
Baffle filters and mesh filters at the canopy. The plenum behind them. The horizontal duct run, the riser, and the extract fan and impeller at the discharge.
Pollution control where fitted: an ecology unit, ESP electrostatic precipitator, UV system or wet scrubber. These need cleaning on their own cycle and are the item most often left out of a cheap contract.
Make-up air (MUA) is the other half of the system and the reason a hood stops capturing. If your kitchen pulls air backwards through the dining room, the extract is not the problem.
Standards: internationally, TR19 in the UK and NFPA 96 in the United States are the two most cited grease-management standards. Neither is Dubai regulation, and we do not present them as such.
Dubai Municipality's Food Code, clause 2.11 Ventilation, is the regulation that actually governs commercial kitchen extract in this city. Alongside it sits DM-HSD-GU46-KFPA2, the Technical Guidelines for Occupational Health & Safety in Kitchens & Food Preparation Areas, version 3. Both are quotable verbatim, and both are worth reading if you are the person the licence sits under.
The strongest fact on this page: neither Dubai document sets a duct-cleaning interval. Competitors across this market claim Dubai Municipality mandates a quarterly clean. It does not. Clause 2.11(e) defers the interval to the concerned department, which means your licence conditions, not a contractor's price list.
A note on language. Both documents are written in "should", not "shall". We describe what they say, what they call for or what they state. Restating a "should" as a "requires" or a "mandates" is the exact overreach a competent operator would flag in others, so we do not do it here either.
Related trades on our books: duct cleaning, indoor air quality testing, cold room repair, commercial maintenance and MEP contracting.
Transparent pricing with no hidden fees. Final price confirmed after assessment.
From AED 145
Home extract hood
From AED 385
Single canopy
From AED 575
Duct clean with record
From AED 2,400
End-to-end clean
From AED 450
Per fan
From AED 180
Per panel
From AED 330 / visit
Contract rate
From AED 350
Per visit
Explore more services from PROTECH Dynamics
PROTECH Dynamics serves all communities across Dubai
Emergency response available to any location across Dubai.
Our emergency team responds 24/7 across all of Dubai.
Send your trading hours and canopy count, and we will schedule the clean out of hours and give you a written quote before any work begins.
Available 24/7 for emergencies | info@protechfitout.com
