Canopy and hood cleaning in Ightham, Kent

Ightham kitchens: local notes

The FSA’s food hygiene register shows about 11 restaurants, cafés and works canteens and about 6 takeaways within roughly a mile and a half of the centre of Ightham. Wherever there’s a canopy over the cooking, its hood and plenum collect grease with every service. It’s Tonbridge and Malling council that sends environmental health officers to food businesses in Ightham. They look at how clean the premises and equipment are, and the kitchen extract is part of that. Before-and-after pictures from each clean are a simple way to show the extract is in hand. Fire safety in Ightham falls to Kent Fire and Rescue Service. Grease in a kitchen extract is a recognised fire risk, and the fire authority enforces the law on managing it in most commercial premises.

Volunteers running a hall kitchen near Church of St Peter, or anywhere in Ightham, may not know when the extract was last cleaned, and a grease test settles it. School kitchens, at schools like Ightham Primary School for example, are usually cleaned in the holidays so no lunches are lost. If your kitchen is in a listed or historic building, like the houses around Ightham (Ightham Mote is about 1.5 miles south), fitting access panels needs care.

Ightham is about 4 miles east of Sevenoaks, in Kent. From the centre of Ightham to the outskirts, canopy cleaning is available to all kinds of commercial premises, from a single unit to a large public building. Our Kent coverage runs to 922 places, and Ightham is one of them. Maidstone is in our area too, about 11 miles from Ightham.

Here we cover the TN15 postcode area for canopy cleaning. That includes premises on The Street, Redwell Lane and Old Lane and nearby roads. If your site is just outside Ightham, we cover Oldbury (1 mile north), Ivy Hatch (1 mile south-west), Sheet Hill (1 mile south-east), Styants Bottom (1 mile north-west) and Yopps Green (1 mile south-east). Larger places within reach include Maidstone (11 miles east), Dartford (12 miles north), Sevenoaks (4 miles west), Royal Tunbridge Wells (10 miles south), Gravesend (11 miles north) and Tonbridge (6 miles south).

Around Ightham

Around Ightham, our work takes us to kitchens and buildings near Ivy Hatch Nature Reserve, Wrotham School and The Old House, among other places. Ightham’s nearest station is Borough Green & Wrotham station, roughly 1.5 miles north-east of the centre. Other landmarks nearby include Ightham Court (1.1 miles north) and Beechin Wood Archery Museum (2.3 miles east).

Managing agents and facilities teams in Ightham

Where a tenant occupies the premises but the landlord owns the building, it’s worth checking the lease for who maintains the systems. We’re happy to deal with either side and send the paperwork to whoever needs it.

The Fire Safety Order 2005 puts the duty to manage fire risk on the responsible person, and that can be the employer, the owner, a landlord, a facilities manager or a managing agent. Where responsibility is shared, records matter even more.

What staff can safely do

A few tasks are always specialist work: entering ducts, working on fans, testing dampers and taking grease readings need training, the right equipment and safe access. Leave those to us.

Day-to-day cleaning is something your team can do: wiping down canopy surfaces, cleaning filters and keeping a simple log. Inside the ducts, risers and fan is specialist work, and that’s where we come in.

How the job changes from site to site

Plenums and filter housings

The plenum is the space behind the filters where air gathers before entering the duct. It catches whatever gets past the filters, and it’s cleaned every time we clean the canopy.

Wall canopies

A wall-mounted canopy runs along the back of the range. The joint between canopy and wall is a common grease trap, so we clean along it as well as the inner skin.