What Are The Most Common Causes Of Commercial Kitchen Fires?

One of the best ways to protect yourself, your catering staff and your commercial kitchen is through vigilance and awareness of the potential risks in your kitchen, which allows for preventative maintenance and cleaning of the extraction mechanism on your kitchen fans.

Some of this is part of legal requirements for employers in catering firms to ensure that they keep staff safe, but the reason why it is the law is that the extractor fan is one of the main ways to stop fires from starting and to keep them from spreading.

To understand why they help, here are some of the most common causes of kitchen fires and where an extractor fan helps to minimise their effect.

Cooking Oil And Fat

Many caterers will shallow fry or deep fry food as part of their menu, but whilst all cooking can potentially cause a fire if undertaken with dangerous equipment or if neglected for long enough, cooking oil is one of the most notorious causes of kitchen fires.

Part of this is that it does not take a lot for a big pan of oil to catch fire, so a moment of destruction can lead to danger. Another aspect is that the most common way to handle a frying pan fire (pouring cold water onto it) can make it significantly worse.

Whilst the best way to stop an oil fire is to smother the flames with a fire blanket, a working extractor fan can help to reduce the spread or prevent the potential for flames to spread.

Faulty Appliances

Most cooking appliances rely on either natural gas, electricity or a combination of both in significant measures. This means that potential faults or overloading can quickly cause a fire.

An extractor fan can help channel some of the smoke away, as well as prevent a gas leak from causing carbon monoxide poisoning as quickly, but it is important to have safety measures in place to cut off gas and electricity supplies if there is a major issue.