Whether your facility is a restaurant, a banquet hall, or a senior center, managing a commercial kitchen takes a lot of skill, expertise, and hard work. It also requires a significant amount of both time and money. And chances are, when you spend that much effort on your business, you’ll want to protect your investment with a rooftop grease containment system.
Want to keep your commercial kitchen operating smoothly and safely? Read on to learn 5 ways a rooftop grease containment system is a simple and easy way to protect your business from a variety of costly, time consuming, and sometimes deadly rooftop grease related hazards.
What Causes Rooftop Grease?
Rooftop grease comes from fat, oil and grease aerosols that have travelled up to your rooftop exhaust fan through your duct system. As they move through your ventilation system, these aerosols solidify onto the cooler surfaces of the duct and fan.
Even with the appropriate grease filters installed in your hood, fat, oil, and grease will collect on the fan blades. This excess build-up will eventually drain out of the fan enclosure and onto the rooftop. This is why a rooftop grease containment system is such a crucial part of every commercial kitchen exhaust system.
Five Reasons You Need A Rooftop Grease Containment System
1. Protects Your Property From Roof & Structural Damage
The most obvious way that a rooftop grease containment system protects your business is by keeping fats, oils and grease from collecting on the surface of your roof.
Grease and oil deposits that build up on your rooftop are very detrimental to your roof membrane. No matter what your roof is made of, grease will eventually damage it. Long exposure to kitchen grease will cause bituminous rooftops to soften and develop a spongy consistency similar to jelly.
When subjected to grease build-up, thermoset roof membranes such as EPDM (ethylene propylene diene terpolymer) will begin to swell and break down. In addition, the bonding strength of adhesives or tapes around EPDM seams becomes weaker when exposed to fats, oils, and grease.
Asphalt rooftops can be dissolved by grease and oil. Hypalon and PVC are also no match for rooftop grease. And once your membrane is damaged and deteriorated, your entire roof is at risk for total system failure. Wrinkling and blistering of roof materials quickly turns into cracking, which then leads to leaks. Before you know it, you’ve voided your roof warranty and compromised the substructure of your roof.
They usually start off small, but eventually, roof leaks will become worse until they make their way into your kitchen and dining areas. Structural damage from leaks can put the entire building at risk. It’s a simple fact that in order to protect your roof and your business, you need a rooftop grease containment system.
2. Reduces Risk Of Fire
Have you ever had to deal with a fire in your commercial kitchen? Even if the damage is minimal, the costs for repair and restoration coupled with the disruption to operations can sometimes be so devastating that they have no other alternative than to simply close their business.
You probably already take many precautions in your kitchen to avoid such a scenario. But did you know that rooftop grease is just as dangerous as grease build-up in your kitchen exhaust hood?
Something as small as an electrical short in a fan or even a strike of lightning can cause a grease-saturated roof to go up in flames. If a fire starts elsewhere in the ventilation system, you can be sure that it will move up through the ductwork and to the roof. There, grease deposits will further fuel the fire as it continues to spread across the rooftop.
3. Protects The Environmental & Reduces Health Hazards
Rooftop grease presents additional hazards you may be unaware of, that could end up costing you quite a bit of money. If you allow grease-contaminated runoff to enter the storm water or sewer system, you could be looking at hefty fines from EPA and other environmental code violations.
In recent years, the EPA has become very strict about water pollution – especially from restaurants and commercial kitchens. Rooftop grease will easily runoff the roof and onto the sidewalks or road when it rains or snows. The polluted water will then enter storm water drains as well as nearby streams and lakes.
Even if you don’t notice it, there’s a good chance the EPA will. Inspectors routinely test for code violations and can trace grease runoff to its source. Violators will be required to perform the necessary cleanup as well as pay any fines.
In addition to polluting the water supply and clogging up sewers, fats, oils, and grease also attract insects, rodents, and other animals. This can lead to health code violations as well as simply make your establishment look – and smell – bad. By installing and maintaining a rooftop grease containment system, you can easily avoid these kinds of headaches.
4. Reduces Safety Hazards
Another, often overlooked, benefit of properly containing rooftop grease is that they reduce safety hazards – both on and off your roof. A damaged roof puts maintenance personnel and others at risk. Even a small amount of grease spill on your roof can pose a serious slip and fall hazard.
Workers required to climb ladders are especially put at risk. As the saying goes, “A spill, a slip, a hospital trip.” And if the grease spill has begun to runoff your roof, it can cause safety and liability concerns for people walking on the surfaces below.
Installing a rooftop grease containment system could easily save you thousands of dollars in personal injury or worker’s compensation claims.
5. Rooftop Grease Containment Is Required By Law
If none of the other reasons were enough to convince you to use a rooftop grease containment system, perhaps this one will be. Simply stated, they are required by the law. In addition to environmental codes related to containing and controlling grease runoff, the NFPA 96 fire code require all commercial cooking operations to install an approved grease collection system for each rooftop exhaust fan.
You may even find that your lease agreement, roof warranty, or insurance company also require one. Even OSHA has something to say about it. If rooftop grease is causing unsafe working conditions and increased fire hazards to workers, you could liable for claims as well as costly fines.
How Do I Choose Which System To Get?
So now you understand the extreme importance of preventing grease from building up on your rooftop and contaminating the water supply. You might be wondering how to decide which system is right for your commercial kitchen.
Rooftop grease containment systems come in a variety of styles to suit different needs. The level of grease containment you need depends on things like the type of cooking fuel used and the volume of cooking your kitchen does.
One of the most popular and cost effective systems that we sell is the Grease Box. It comes in three sizes: the Grease Box Original, the Grease Box Jr., and the Grease Box X-Treme. Here’s a video overview discussing the features and benefits of the Grease Box.
To learn more about the rooftop grease containment systems and other commercial kitchen ventilation products we offer, visit us online at HoodFilters.com. If you have any questions or want help picking out the system that is right for you, give us a call at 877.394.9731 and one of our product specialists would be happy to assist you.