Commercial Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning in Denver & Colorado

NFPA 96 and Your Local Fire Authority

NFPA 96 — the Standard for Ventilation Control and Fire Protection of Commercial Cooking Operations — is the national baseline every jurisdiction works from. It sets cleaning frequency by cooking volume: monthly for high-volume and solid-fuel cooking, quarterly for most full-service kitchens, semi-annual for low-volume operations, and annual for seasonal or very light cooking.

What varies is enforcement. In practice the person who asks to see your records is the fire department inspector, and two things answer that request: a dated cleaning sticker on the hood, and the service report itself. Where the jurisdiction requires it, that report has to be filed for compliance rather than simply kept in a binder on site.

How often an inspector comes back is not a fixed calendar either — it tracks what you cook over, and the cooking fuel is what drives it. Solid-fuel operations sit at the demanding end of that range. When a kitchen does get written up, the finding is usually the simplest one there is: the amount of accumulated grease left in the system. Some jurisdictions go a step further and require the cleaning contractor itself to hold certification, not just the operator to hold records.

The misunderstanding we run into most often has nothing to do with the schedule. It is whether a cleaning was actually finished. A hood and its filters can look clean while grease is still packed through the horizontal duct run and inside the fan housing — the difference between a completed job and one that is still in progress. That is why every Enviromatic cleaning in Denver is photographed and documented rather than simply declared done, and why the company has spent five decades on a single promise: we prove it’s clean.

Read our full kitchen exhaust cleaning FAQs →