Before the questions: what a hood cleaning quote usually leaves out
Most commercial kitchen cleaning purchases start with a phone call and one number: the price per hood, per month. That question is not wrong, but on its own it compares nothing. Two suppliers can quote the same hood for very different work, and the difference rarely shows up in the line item. If you are a facility manager, a food-service operator or a procurement lead evaluating central kitchen cleaning equipment, the useful comparison begins with what each quote assumes about access, water, downtime and verification.
The questions below are grouped the way a buying decision actually unfolds: first the site conditions you already control, then the equipment and process the supplier proposes, then the evidence you can hold them to afterwards.
Questions about the site you are cleaning
Write the answers down before you invite anyone to quote. They decide which equipment categories are even eligible.
- Where is the hood, and how much floor space is available while it is being cleaned? A hood above a live cook line is a different job from a hood in a vacated central kitchen, and the machine footprint matters: ask each supplier for the footprint of the fixed unit they propose — the PowerDe HW02 steam cleaner page publishes its own figure, handles included — and then measure your own aisle each supplier for the dimensions of what they propose and measure your own aisle before you compare.
- What power is within reach of the hood? A 220 V supply is stated on the HW02 page; a supplier proposing a different voltage or a generator is proposing a different job, with different setup time.
- What water supply can you offer? Ask how the proposed machine is fed, how much it holds, and what happens when the tank runs empty mid-shift. The HW02 page publishes its own inlet fitting and tank capacity; get the same two details in writing for whatever is being quoted to you.
- Where does the removed grease and rinse water go? Hood cleaning produces greasy runoff. Confirm your drain route, containment and any local requirement before choosing a method that depends on flushing.
- Can the kitchen run during the work, or does the line have to stop? Ask each supplier to state the downtime they need, then put that downtime in the comparison next to the price.
Questions about the cleaning method itself
Ask each supplier to describe, in writing, how grease is lifted from the hood surfaces and how long the surfaces stay wet. High-temperature steam works on soft, sticky grease films because heat lowers the grease's resistance to being lifted; a method that relies on chemicals plus scrubbing works by a different route and has different costs. Ask what the method does not reach — duct interiors, fans, filters, the underside of the canopy — and whether that separate work is included.
Ask whether the machine offers a dry-steam mode and a wet-steam mode, and who decides which one is used on which surface. On steam units that publish both modes, the practical difference for a kitchen is how much liquid ends up on the floor and equipment below the hood. If your real constraint is a wet floor, that question is worth more than a discount.
Ask what temperature and pressure are actually claimed for the machine being offered, and ask for the number as the supplier's own, not a marketing range. Steam temperature and vapour pressure are stated on the HW02 detail page rather than repeated here, because those figures belong to a specific configuration and change with it. If a supplier cannot state figures for the exact unit they will deliver, they are selling an assumption.
Questions about equipment suitability and scope
This is where most commercial hood projects go wrong, and it is the easiest set of questions to ask. PowerDe's published cleaning listings describe vehicle exterior cleaning at stations and parking facilities, interior vacuuming and disinfection, and engine-compartment cleaning for the fixed unit, and medical machinery for the hand-pushed units. Kitchen hood work is a purchasing direction rather than a line item on those pages. So put the question directly to the supplier: which of your configurations has been operated on a commercial exhaust hood, by you, and what happened? A supplier who answers with named deployments is giving you evidence; a supplier who answers with generalities is selling the same machine you already saw.
Then ask what is not suitable. Ask whether steam should be used near electrical junction boxes, motor housings, insulated duct seams, or bearings — and get a plain answer. Ask what the supplier's own staff refuse to clean with steam. Ask how they protect burners, ignition modules, and control panels during a hood job. Ask who pays if a component fails after the wash and how that is assessed. If the supplier cannot answer these, ask for a supervised trial on one hood before signing a multi-site schedule.
Questions about safety, protection and operator training
Ask which protective functions the machine has and what each one does in practice. The HW02 overview names leakage, short-circuit, high-temperature, high-voltage, water-shortage and high-voltage-explosion protection; do not accept a count of protections from a supplier — ask for the named list for the unit they will actually deliver, and then ask what the machine does when each condition occurs. Ask how operators are trained, how long that training takes, and whether it is repeated. In a kitchen, the people using the machine are usually not the buyer, and the failure mode is an operator pointing a high-temperature lance at something they should not.
Ask what personal protective equipment is required, what the burn and slip risk looks like on your actual floor, and how the work area is closed off while the kitchen is running. Ask the same question in reverse: what would the supplier need from your site in order to do this safely.
Questions about cost, throughput and total water use
Rebuild the price as a cost per hood per completed visit, not a price per machine or per month. Include setup and teardown, containment of runoff, the labour hours the crew states, downtime of your cook line, consumables, and whether chemicals are needed as a pre-treatment. Two suppliers can offer the same equipment and produce different cost per completed visit purely through crew size and setup time.
Ask how many hoods one operator can finish in one visit at your site, and on what basis they know. Ask what limits the rate — tank capacity, heating recovery, travel between surfaces, or drying time. Ask how often the tank must be refilled on a job of your size. Steam cleaning is often chosen because it uses less water than flushing, but "less water" is not the same as "no water", and the number of refills is a real labour cost. For a wider view of what a supplier can configure for your site, ask them to walk through their customized steam cleaning equipment service with your floor plan in hand.
Questions about results, records and after-sales
Agree the definition of "done" before the first visit. Ask what evidence of completion the supplier produces: photographs of the same surfaces at the same angles, a signed checklist naming each hood and each part cleaned, and a note of what was not cleaned and why. Ask who inspects, and ask them to inspect at your site on the first visit, not from a report. Ask what happens on the second visit if the first result is judged inadequate, and what the remedy costs.
Ask how the machine is serviced: what warranty covers, what wear parts need replacement, how fast a failed unit is swapped, and what happens if your site is out of the supplier's service radius. Ask who supplies spare lances, hoses and nozzles, and what a replacement costs. Equipment purchased cheaply and repaired slowly is not cheap.
How to run the comparison itself
Put the answers in one table: one column per supplier, one row per question above, and mark every blank cell as unknown rather than leaving it out. A blank cell is a finding, and it is usually the cheapest one you will get. Then ask the two shortest-listed suppliers one follow-up each, in writing.
If you are comparing more than one equipment family, keep the site conditions fixed between them. A comparison that changes both the machine and the job description proves nothing. The PowerDe cleaning equipment listings and the company's engineering-services pages are the place to check which configurations exist and which are documented — read the parameter table on the page for the specific model, and treat scenario claims that are not on that page as questions to ask rather than facts to assume.
The point of the question set is not to find the best-sounding answer. It is to make every supplier describe the same job, so the price you compare means the same thing twice.
