The most useful part of NFPA 96 is its schedule: how often your exhaust system must be inspected and cleaned, by how much grease your cooking produces. Right tier, and compliance is a calendar entry. Wrong tier, and the sticker on your hood says so 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 Madison 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 — a faster-building, more combustible deposit — so these systems get the shortest leash. Add a smoker to a semi-annual kitchen and your tier changed the day you lit it.
24-hour operations, charbroiling, wok lines, heavy fryer banks. And here’s the honest Wisconsin note: a packed Friday fish fry is a fryer-volume event, every week, all year. Supper clubs and taverns that treat Friday like a holiday shift often belong in quarterly no matter how quiet Tuesday is.
The typical sit-down restaurant on normal hours with a mixed menu. The most common tier — and the most commonly self-assigned by kitchens whose fryer schedule says quarterly.
Churches, day camps, seasonal operations, senior centers — and any kitchen reopening after an extended shutdown gets cleaned before the burners relight.
The intervals are minimums. If inspection finds grease past acceptable depth early, the system needs cleaning then — trained cleaners measure with a depth gauge, not a glance. A kitchen that keeps outrunning its tier between visits belongs a tier up, and a good company says so.
Wood or charcoal? Monthly. Around the clock, charbroiling, woks, a heavy fryer line — or a fish fry that owns your Fridays? Quarterly. Normal hours, mixed menu? Semi-annually. Occasional cooking? Annually. Unsure? Choose “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, and the inspector reads the date against your tier first. 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 Madison 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.
Madison Hood Cleaning — Connecting Madison-area restaurants and commercial kitchens with trained, insured kitchen exhaust cleaning companies.
Serving Madison, Middleton, Fitchburg, Sun Prairie, Verona, Waunakee, Monona, Stoughton, and Dane County.
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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. Madison Hood Cleaning is a referral service and does not itself perform exhaust cleaning, inspection, or certification.