The equipment had not arrived when the first site visit happened. Someone walked the cooking line with a notebook, a tape measure and a phone camera, and wrote down the questions a supplier would have to ask before suggesting anything. A year later, on a second site, the same walk was made after the machine was already on the floor and plumbed in. That second visit produced a long list of corrections, none of them about cleaning power. The gap between the two visits is worth describing, because the object being decided is not a catalogue item - it is a recommendation for a specific job: grease-covered kitchen equipment, in one building, cleaned by one particular crew in one particular window of time.
The deposit is the first question, not the equipment
A supplier who takes the phrase "grease-covered kitchen equipment" at face value cannot recommend anything responsibly. Grease on a kitchen surface is not one condition. Splashed oil that dried overnight on a stainless bench behaves differently from a waxed-on layer at the back of a griddle that has survived several seasons of the same wipe-down, and both behave differently from the sticky film that gathers where airborne grease meets a warm wall or a frame section. The questions that matter at this stage are about history and source: how long has the deposit been there, what produced it, and what has already been done to it.
Ask what the current cleaning routine is, and what it leaves behind. Where a crew wipes with a detergent and a cloth every night, the residue that builds up is usually the stuff that routine cannot lift, which tells a supplier more than a photograph of a dirty surface. Then ask for the deposit to be described by surface, not by room. A kitchen is not one surface: benches, sink bowls, splash backs, equipment cladding, hood panels, frames and legs all differ in material, temperature and how far a worker can reach.
One more question belongs here, and it is often skipped: which parts of that equipment must not get wet at all, or must not be heated. Controls, displays, wiring entries, bearings, insulated handles, labels and information plates are usually the reason a cleaning job goes wrong, and a recommendation that does not name them has not been thought through. A good supplier asks for this exclusion list before they ask anything about the machine.
The equipment itself has to be described in a way that survives a recommendation
The second question set is about the objects being cleaned rather than the soil on them. Free-standing or fixed to the floor; whether there is a gap behind and beneath the unit, and how wide; whether legs, feet, castors and frame sections are visible and reachable, or buried; the height of the working face and whether a person can stand square to it; whether anything overhead has to be worked under. A recommendation for a heavy-duty job at low level reads very differently from a recommendation where the operator has to reach over a hot surface to get an angle.
Then the electrical question, and it is not about the cleaning machine. A kitchen full of cooking equipment has its own supply arrangement, its own isolators and its own rules about what may be taken out of service. If the equipment being cleaned is part of the production line, then cleaning it means stopping it, and the length of the window is set by the kitchen's service schedule, not by the cleaning method. The supplier needs to know the size of the window before they can recommend a method that fits inside it.
Write the description down as a list of items with a line for each: what it is made of, whether it is fixed, what is around it, what is excluded, and what the finish has to look like when the job is done. A supplier can work from that. A sentence such as "the kitchen is very greasy" cannot be recommended against.
Who is doing the work, and how they were trained
Ask who will actually hold the lance: an in-house kitchen team, a maintenance technician, or a contracted cleaning crew. The answer changes what a supplier should recommend. A kitchen team works to a rota, rotates between stations, and will not attend a machine that needs a lengthy start-up routine every shift. A maintenance technician reads specification tables and expects spares to be stocked. A contracted crew arrives with their own equipment and asks whether your site can supply water and power where they are standing.
Ask how the people doing the job learned it, and whether anyone on site can sign off the method. If nobody on site is accountable for the cleaning outcome, then a supplier's recommendation has no one to hand over to, and the equipment will be operated in whatever way the nearest person guesses. This is a procurement question disguised as an operational one, and it is one of the few that reliably changes the quotation.
Ask, plainly, whether the crew has used a steam method before. Kitchen staff who have only ever used a hose, a bucket and a cloth will need the handover written into the purchase, not added later as a courtesy.
What the site can supply at the working position
This is where most recommendations fail, and it is the reason a site visit beats a description sent by email. A supplier needs to know what is available at the place the work happens, not what exists somewhere in the building. The list is short and each item needs a measured answer.
- Electrical supply at the position. Which socket or circuit is within reach of the working area, what its rating is, and who is allowed to connect to it. A long cable across a wet kitchen floor is a safety objection that ends most proposals, and it is decided by where the supply is, not by the equipment.
- Water inlet and fitting. Whether a tap is reachable, whether it is a standard fitting or something else, and how the machine is expected to be fed. Published tables state a water inlet method and a fitting note; a supplier can only confirm compatibility once they know what is on your wall.
- Run-off and drainage. Where the loosened grease and water go. Grease-laden run-off has to reach a drain or a collection point, and in a kitchen that route has to avoid food contact surfaces. If the answer is "there is no drain nearby", that changes the method before any machine is discussed.
- Space to stand and space for the machine. The footprint of a fixed unit, its handles, and the clearance an operator needs to move around it. Measure the aisle, the door the equipment arrives through, and the position it will work from. A machine that cannot be brought in and stood square to the work is not a candidate, whatever its specification says.
- What else is in use in that window. Whether extraction is running, whether neighbouring equipment stays hot, and whether the floor is in use by other staff while the work is happening.
A supplier who receives this list gives a different answer from one who receives a photograph. The central commercial kitchen degreasing machine page is a useful test of this: it publishes a specification table, and a buyer who cannot say what supply, inlet, run-off and clearance exist at their own working position cannot yet act on that table.
When the work happens, and what has to be stopped first
Ask which hours are actually available. In most kitchens the only realistic window is after service and before the next preparation starts, and it is shorter than anyone wants it to be. The recommendation has to fit that window. A method that needs a long dwell, repeated passes, or a cooling-down period before people can work normally again may be technically suitable and practically impossible.
Ask what has to be isolated, and by whom. Cooking equipment has gas, electrical and sometimes water connections, and a cleaning job that involves working close to those needs a handover and a hand-back, with named people responsible for each. Ask who holds the keys or the permission, and how long that takes. In practice the isolation and hand-back steps often consume more of the window than the cleaning itself, and a supplier who knows this will propose a sequence rather than a machine.
Ask whether the schedule is nightly, weekly or periodic. Nightly work on cooking-line surfaces is a different problem from a periodic strip-down of panels and frames, and mixing them up in one enquiry produces a recommendation for neither. Many kitchens end up with two answers: a short routine the kitchen team runs, and a heavier periodic job that is planned, staffed and scheduled in advance.
The questions that decide what is being bought, and what proves it
Ask what the site has already tried and what happened. A detergent that has been used for years, a scrubbing routine that has worn the finish on a surface, a steam cleaner hired for a weekend - all of that is evidence, and it tells a supplier where the method has to be better rather than merely different.
Ask what counts as clean. This sounds obvious and is usually the vaguest item in an enquiry. Write it per surface: the finish expected on a working bench, the finish expected on a frame leg at the rear of a unit, the finish expected on a hood panel, and which residues are acceptable to leave. Then agree how each one will be judged - looked at, touched, or wiped with a cloth and the cloth inspected - and who makes that judgement. A recommendation that comes with an agreed finish and an agreed test is a purchasable thing; a recommendation without one is a promise.
Ask for the trial to happen on your own equipment, in your own window, with your own people present, before anything is bought. The published central kitchen degreasing product pages describe what a machine is built to do; they do not describe what it will do to a particular deposit on a particular griddle in a particular kitchen. A bounded trial settles that in a single session, and it should include at least one surface you expect to fail, so the limits of the method become visible rather than discovered later.
Ask which parts of the site conditions are yours to fix. Some of the objections a supplier raises - no drain at the working position, no supply within reach, no clearance at the stand position - are civil or building matters, not equipment matters, and deciding who pays for them before the order is what keeps the delivery date.
A written set of answers makes the supplier useful
The reason these questions matter commercially is simple: a supplier recommends against the information they are given. Send the deposit description, the equipment list with exclusions, the rota and the available window, the measured site answers, and the agreed definition of a clean result, and you get a proposal that can be compared with another supplier's proposal. Send a photograph and a budget, and you get a product name that you will have to defend internally later.
For a job that goes beyond the standard catalogue - a fixed position, a particular utility arrangement, a combination of steam with water or foam, or a configuration for a specific kitchen - the scope is set out as a customisation project on the customized steam cleaning equipment page, where the requirement list, the technical evaluation and the scheme design happen before a machine is quoted. For a kitchen where a fixed unit is being considered rather than a mobile one, the fixed steam cleaning machine page is where the published rows - working voltage, water inlet, tank volume, machine dimensions including handles - start to be read against your own site answers.
The list above costs an hour of walking with a tape measure. It is the cheapest part of the decision, and it is the part most often left out, which is why the corrections tend to arrive after the equipment has been installed.
