The most useful part of NFPA 96 is a table: how often your exhaust system must be inspected and cleaned, based on how much grease your cooking produces. Get the tier right and compliance is a calendar entry. Get it wrong and the sticker on your hood announces it to anyone who reads it.
We’re a local referral service for commercial kitchens. Call or send the form and we’ll connect you with a trained, insured kitchen exhaust cleaning company serving the Greenville area — one that cleans the full system to NFPA 96 and leaves the documentation your fire inspector and insurer expect. No charge for the referral.
Wood-fired ovens, charcoal grills, smokers venting through the system. Solid fuel adds creosote to the grease — a faster-building, more combustible deposit — so the standard puts these systems on the shortest leash. If you added a smoker to a semi-annual kitchen, your tier changed the day you lit it.
24-hour operations, charbroiling, wok lines, heavy fryer banks. Most high-throughput kitchens and sports-bar fryer walls live here — and so do more “moderate” kitchens than admit it.
The typical sit-down restaurant on normal hours with a mixed menu. The most common tier — and the most commonly self-assigned by kitchens that honestly belong in quarterly.
Churches, day camps, seasonal operations, senior centers. Once a year — and before reopening after any extended shutdown.
The intervals are minimums. If inspection finds grease past acceptable depth early, the system needs cleaning then — trained cleaners measure with a depth gauge rather than eyeballing. A kitchen that keeps blowing through its tier between visits belongs in the next tier up, and a good cleaning company will say so.
Wood or charcoal? Monthly. Around-the-clock, charbroiling, woks, or a heavy fryer line? Quarterly. Normal hours, mixed menu? Semi-annually — but be honest about the fryers. Occasional cooking? Annually. Genuinely unsure? Pick “Not sure — need a tier assessment” on the form and the first visit settles it with a grease-depth reading instead of a guess.
Every compliant cleaning ends with a dated sticker on the hood and a signed report on premises. The inspector reads the date against your tier before anything else: a charbroiling kitchen with a nine-month-old sticker has announced its problem from across the room. Inspection prep here.
We’re a local referral service for commercial kitchens. Call or send the form and we’ll connect you with a trained, insured kitchen exhaust cleaning company serving the Greenville area — one that cleans the full system to NFPA 96 and leaves the documentation your fire inspector and insurer expect. No charge for the referral.
Greenville Hood Cleaning — Connecting Upstate restaurants and commercial kitchens with trained, insured kitchen exhaust cleaning companies.
Serving Greenville, Spartanburg, Greer, Mauldin, Simpsonville, Taylors, Travelers Rest, Easley, and the Upstate.
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Information on this site is general guidance on NFPA 96 and commercial kitchen exhaust maintenance, not a compliance determination for your specific kitchen — your local fire authority makes that call. Greenville Hood Cleaning is a referral service and does not itself perform exhaust cleaning, inspection, or certification.