Why hood cleaning and grease-trap compliance are two separate obligations

Ask a kitchen owner who handles their "cleaning," and most will name one vendor. Ask a fire inspector and a sewer-by-law inspector the same question, and they're checking two completely different things. Hood cleaning and grease-trap compliance aren't two halves of the same chore. They're two separate legal obligations that happen to both live in the same kitchen.

Different codes, different inspectors, different paperwork.

NFPA 96 is a fire-code standard, enforced by fire inspectors, aimed at preventing exhaust-system grease fires. O.Reg 347 and your municipality's sewer use by-law are environmental and infrastructure rules, enforced separately, aimed at keeping grease out of the sewer system. Each one keeps its own inspection schedule, its own documentation requirement, and its own penalty structure. Nothing about passing one tells an inspector anything about the other.

Why most kitchens end up with a gap.

Because the two obligations are unrelated, most kitchens hire for them separately, if they hire for both at all. A hood-cleaning specialist handles the exhaust system and stops there. A grease-trap company pumps the interceptor and has no involvement in your hood. Whoever manages the relationship, usually the owner, ends up doing the coordination work themselves: two schedules, two invoices, two sets of records to keep straight, with no single vendor accountable for the whole picture.

What one vendor actually changes.

Bundling both services under one vendor doesn't merge the two obligations into one. NFPA 96 and your sewer by-law stay separate rules with separate requirements. What changes is who's tracking both schedules and holding both sets of paperwork. One compliance binder, kept current by one vendor, replaces two informal systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

Northfire covers both under one contract, bundled or separate. Hood & exhaust cleaning →  ·  Grease trap & FOG compliance →