Range hood cleaning in Phoenix

Ducted or recirculating: the question that decides everything in a Phoenix kitchen

Before anything else, find out which kind of hood you have. It changes what cleaning is worth and what you should expect afterwards.

A ducted hood pulls air through the filters and pushes it out of the house through a duct to an exterior wall cap or a roof termination. Heat, moisture, smoke, and grease-laden air leave the building.

A recirculating hood pulls air through a grease filter, then through a charcoal filter, and blows it back into your kitchen. Nothing leaves the house. It removes some grease and some odor, and it returns the heat and the moisture to the room you are standing in.

In a lot of Phoenix kitchens, the hood is the underside of an over-the-range microwave, and a large share of those are recirculating. Plenty were installed that way even where a duct route existed, because it is quicker.

Neither type is wrong. But if yours recirculates, cleaning it will not make your kitchen clear like a ducted hood, and anybody implying otherwise is selling you something. The technician will tell you which you have, on the day, before doing the work.

The part you should do yourself

If your hood has a metal mesh or baffle filter, take it out and put it through a hot dishwasher cycle, or soak it in hot water with dish soap and a spoonful of baking soda.

That is most of the visible benefit of this service, and it costs you nothing but ten minutes. We would rather say so on the page than take $59 for something you can do between loads of laundry.

What you cannot easily do yourself is the canopy interior, the surfaces behind and above the filters, and the fan housing. That is where grease accumulates out of sight, and it is what you are actually paying us for. If your filter is bad but the rest of the hood is clean, do the filter and skip us.

Why grease in a Phoenix hood is worse than it looks

Valley dust does not stay out of your kitchen, and it settles into whatever is already there.

Grease alone stays somewhat soft and wipes with effort. Grease that has been collecting airborne dust binds into a harder, more stubborn deposit that does not respond to a quick wipe. It is why range hood filters in Phoenix homes frequently look older than they are, and why a soak works better than scrubbing.

The practical concern with accumulated grease is simple and physical: it is flammable, and it collects directly above a heat source. We are not going to quote you fire statistics we have not verified from a primary source, and we do not need to. That is the reason to keep it clean.

Commercial kitchens: not our service

If you run a restaurant, a food truck, a commercial kitchen, a school kitchen, or any facility with a commercial hood and grease duct system, this is not the service you need and we are not the company.

Commercial kitchen exhaust cleaning is a certified specialist trade. It is governed by fire code, it carries documentation and inspection requirements, and it involves cleaning the full grease duct system to the roof, not just a canopy and some filters. Doing it half-properly is worse than not doing it, and it is a liability question rather than a cleaning question.

We do residential hoods. If you call us about a commercial kitchen, we will tell you this on the phone and point you toward a certified hood cleaning company rather than sending someone out.

What we do not do

We clean and we document. No appliance repair, no motor or fan replacement, no electrical work, no ductwork changes, no new roof or wall penetrations, and no dismantling of the appliance beyond removing filters and accessible panels.

We do not clean commercial grease duct systems. We do not supply charcoal filters, though we will tell you the size you need.

If the fan is failing, if the hood is undersized for your cooktop, or if a ducted hood turns out to terminate somewhere it should not, you will get a plain description of what we found and a recommendation to bring in the right trade.