Restaurant Ventilation Best Practices

Keeping up with best practices for running a restaurant is imperative for all restaurant owners. Whether you are looking to start a new restaurant or have been in business for a while, your restaurant can benefit significantly from making sure all operations are running as smoothly as possible. There are a number of different areas where restaurants of all types can tighten up to increase their bottom line but none have as much impact as tightening up your restaurant’s ventilation system.

Having a proper system of ventilation in place is necessary for both employee and customer health. The costs of a restaurant having inadequate ventilation are real. A poor system of ventilation can result in safety violations, lower employee morale and productivity, higher utility bills and worst of all; exasperated customers. All together, a poor restaurant ventilation system will cause your place of business to be a less desirable destination for paying customers.

In order to make sure your ventilation is doing the job that it should be there are a few different areas you can check. Restaurant ventilation is a system built with a few key components. If one component hasn’t received the attention that it deserves it can adversely affect the entire system.

The first place that we like to check for needed improvements is with your restaurants makeup air supply. “Makeup air” is the air that is brought in from outdoors in order to replace the air that the ventilation system is removing from your establishment. An inadequate supply of makeup air can result in a condition called negative pressure. Negative pressure can causes doors that slam, reduced energy efficiency, areas that are drafty or stuffy and back-venting of gases from ventilation equipment.

After making sure that your makeup air supply is providing enough air for your restaurant ventilation system the next step is to move into the your restaurant’s kitchen. The kitchen is the most important place for ventilation due to all the activity going on in there. A restaurant kitchen needs to stay cool. Studies have shown that employees are at their most productive in temperature just above 71 degrees. Otherwise, more mistakes are made and any refrigeration equipment will need to work harder to keep things cool, increasing costs for to operate your business.

Proper restaurant ventilation greatly improves air quality as well. Ventilation hoods should be placed directly above all cooking appliances for best performance. Having all cooking equipment up against the wall of your kitchen increases efficiency too.

The benefits of having a great system of ventilation are numerous and can be easily overlooked. If you have any questions or would like one of CS Ventilation’s trained technicians to come to your establishment to outline potential improvements don’t hesitate to call CS Ventilation today.