Every hood cleaning company has the same two failure modes. A client goes twelve months between visits because nobody flagged the due date. And a client gets cleaned on a schedule nobody can justify, so when they price-shop there is no reason to keep paying you.
Both come from the same place: the interval lives in somebody's head instead of in the system.
What Actually Sets the Interval
NFPA 96 assigns the inspection interval by cooking volume and by the equipment in use. Solid fuel — a wood-fired oven — is monthly on the strength of the fuel alone, regardless of covers. High-volume operations, including charcoal grilling, are quarterly. Moderate-volume, semiannually. Low-volume, annually.
That is two data points per client: what they cook on, and how much. Neither changes often. Both are knowable on the first visit. Once they are recorded against the client, the next due date computes itself and never depends on anyone remembering.
The Cleaning Is a Separate Event With a Separate Trigger
This is the part that changes how you sell and how you document. The interval schedules the inspection. Cleaning is triggered by measured grease depth: at 0.078 in. (2,000 microns) the surfaces are cleaned, in a fan housing at 0.125 in. (3,175 microns), and cleaning removes contaminants to a maximum of 0.002 in. (50 microns). There is also a standing requirement to clean before surfaces become heavily contaminated, independent of any reading.
For your solid-fuel and high-volume clients the two collapse: the depth is over every time, so you clean every visit. For moderate and low-volume clients they genuinely separate, and that is opportunity most companies leave on the table. An inspection that finds the system over the limit at month four is a cleaning you justify with a number instead of an argument.
It also protects you. A client who declines the cleaning after a documented reading has declined in writing, and the reading is on the report.
Make the Reading a Required Field
A crew that carries the gauge and a report template that will not close without the number is the whole implementation. Before and after, at the points where grease actually collects — the horizontal duct runs, the plenum, the fan.
That gives you four things at once: a scope you can defend, a report an adjuster can read, a reason the next visit is due, and a document your client hands to their fire marshal without calling you first.
What the Schedule Should Hold
For every client: the cooking classification and what set it, the inspection interval that follows, the last visit date, the depth reading from that visit, and the next due date computed from the interval.
With those five, the schedule tells you what is coming before the client asks. Without them you are running a business on recall.
One Pass This Week
Go through your client list once. For each one, write down what they cook on and their volume, set the interval from those two, and compute the next date. It is an afternoon for most companies.
Then make the depth reading mandatory on the report template. After that the schedule runs itself and every job produces the document that keeps the client.
HoodOps holds the cooking profile on the client, sets the next due date from it, requires the reading before a job can close, and delivers the report and certificate to the client's account when it does.
Schedule a Demo: gethoodops.com
About the Author
Arthur Haggerty is the founder of Cleaning Pros Plus, LLC and its family of companies — HoodOps and Stovio Advisors. He is a Certified Exhaust System Inspector (CESI #200771) and holds the Certified Exhaust Cleaning Specialist credential (CECS #200452), and Cleaning Pros Plus, LLC is an IKECA member. He has served as an expert witness in an NFPA 96 commercial kitchen fire case. Before founding Cleaning Pros Plus, he spent 25 years in enterprise IT and cybersecurity consulting across industries at Deloitte, Cisco and Dell, including a decade in IT audit and compliance, and holds an M.S. in Information Technology. He is a ten-year U.S. Air Force veteran.