Keep Your Restaurant's Rangehood Filter Clean With These Tips

Your rangehood filter extracts oil from the cooking fumes and vapors that are leaving your kitchen through your ventilation system. If your filter is dirty, it allows oil to escape into your ventilation system. That can clog motors, causing fans to shut down and disabling your system. Dirty filters also block air from entering the ventilation system, and as a result, more cooking fumes, smoke and odors escape from your kitchen into your restaurant's dining area.

Keeping your rangehood filter clean can be challenging, but with the right system, it's easy. Take a look at these tips:

1. Make sure you have an ample number of filters.

The amount of grease that hits your filter varies drastically depending on the amount of food your kitchen produces, the ingredients you use, the size of your kitchen and other factors. If you don't have an adequate number of hood fans and filters, your ventilation system won't be able to keep up with your kitchen's needs. To ensure your kitchen is adequately ventilated, consult with a commercial kitchen exhaust system expert.

2. Install filters correctly.

In addition to ensuring you have the right number of filters, you have to ensure you install them correctly. If not installed correctly, your filters won't give your kitchen the protection it needs. Many filters need to be installed on a slant. This allows grease to run off the filter into a small receptacle or grease channel. Make sure that your filters are installed correctly and that your staff is emptying the grease channels on a regular basis.

3. Incorporate filter cleaning into your regular cleaning schedule.

If you just have a single rangehood filter, add cleaning it to your cleaning list for every Monday evening when you shut early, for the first of the month when you deep clean everything or at another time that works well with your schedule. The objective is to incorporate filter cleaning as a regular and expected duty -- that way, it's harder to accidentally overlook it.

4. Consider a rotating filter cleaning strategy.

However, if you have multiple filters, cleaning them all on the same day can get labourious. Instead, consider a rotating cleaning schedule. Mentally arrange your filters in a line -- for example, from the left of the kitchen to the right or from the front to the back.

Every day, your employees should remove one filter and clean it. Then, they should bump all of the existing filters over one spot in the line you have created, and they should put the clean filter at the end of the line. The next day, they should wash the filter at the front of the line, and so on.

5. Choose an easy cleaning strategy.

In addition to creating a schedule that makes it easy for your employees to remember to clean the hood fan, you also need to choose an easy cleaning strategy. You could drop the filter into a pot of boiling water with a bit of baking soda. Alternatively, you could let your employees pressure wash the filters on the floor near the kitchen drain. Don't be afraid to experiment with cleaning strategies until you find one that works for you and your team.

Keeping your rangehood filters is important but not always easy. To make it easy, you need the right number of filters, correct installation, and easy cleaning schedules and strategies. For more tips, contact a filter expert.