From a State Street lunch counter to a supper club plating its Friday fish fry to a hospital kitchen running three services a day, every commercial kitchen in the Madison area carries the same three obligations. Your exhaust system is on a cleaning schedule set by NFPA 96 — the kitchen ventilation standard adopted under Wisconsin’s SPS 314 fire code — monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually by cooking volume. Every cleaning must be documented, with the record kept on site for the fire inspector. And the grease in the duct is the building’s most preventable fire risk: NFPA’s restaurant fire data found 61% of these fires involve cooking equipment, with failure to clean a factor in 22%.
This site does one thing: connects Madison-area operators with trained, insured kitchen exhaust cleaning companies that clean the whole system — hood, filters, duct, rooftop fan — and leave the paperwork behind. Owner to owner, no drama.
We’re a local referral service for commercial kitchens. Call or send the form and we’ll connect you with a trained, insured kitchen exhaust cleaning company serving the Madison area — one that cleans the full system to NFPA 96 and leaves the documentation your fire inspector and insurer expect. No charge for the referral.
NFPA 96 sorts kitchens by grease production. Monthly: solid fuel — wood or charcoal. Quarterly: high volume — 24-hour lines, charbroiling, woks, heavy frying (a serious Friday fish fry pushes plenty of Wisconsin kitchens here). Semi-annually: the typical full-service restaurant. Annually: low volume — churches, camps, seasonal and supper-adjacent kitchens that cook lightly. Heavy grease at inspection moves you up. Find your tier.
A canopy shine and a filter swap is not what the standard describes and not what stops a duct fire — the fire lives in the duct, not on the canopy. A compliant cleaning runs hood to rooftop fan, to bare metal, with access panels where the duct needs them, before/after photos, a dated sticker, and a signed report kept on your premises.
A single-hood restaurant typically lands at $400–$600 per visit for a full-system cleaning; multi-hood kitchens and long duct runs higher. Multiply by your tier for the annual line item — the cost page does the math and explains why the cheapest quote usually skips the duct.
Madison runs on institutional kitchens — campus dining, hospital food service, corporate cafeterias, school districts. Same standard, more auditors, harder scheduling windows. Facility managers start here.
Yes. Wisconsin’s fire code — SPS 314 — adopts NFPA 1, which requires kitchen exhaust systems to follow NFPA 96’s inspection and cleaning schedule. Locally, the City of Madison Fire Department’s fire prevention side conducts commercial inspections, and the hood sticker and cleaning records are standard checks. Citations here.
The sticker date against your tier, the documentation on file, grease at the hood and filters, and often the duct access panels and rooftop fan. Inspection prep here.
Very much. Insurers expect NFPA 96 maintenance, and a kitchen fire in a system with an overdue cleaning is a claim conversation nobody wins. The documentation binder is for your adjuster as much as your inspector.
The companies we refer are trained, insured, clean the full system to NFPA 96, and provide compliant documentation. Wisconsin doesn’t license hood cleaning as a trade, so the credentials that matter are training, insurance, and the paperwork — ask any bidder for all three.
We’re a local referral service for commercial kitchens. Call or send the form and we’ll connect you with a trained, insured kitchen exhaust cleaning company serving the Madison area — one that cleans the full system to NFPA 96 and leaves the documentation your fire inspector and insurer expect. No charge for the referral.
Madison Hood Cleaning — Connecting Madison-area restaurants and commercial kitchens with trained, insured kitchen exhaust cleaning companies.
Serving Madison, Middleton, Fitchburg, Sun Prairie, Verona, Waunakee, Monona, Stoughton, and Dane County.
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Call: (608) 765-5600
Information on this site is general guidance on NFPA 96 and commercial kitchen exhaust maintenance, not a compliance determination for your specific kitchen — your local fire authority makes that call. Madison Hood Cleaning is a referral service and does not itself perform exhaust cleaning, inspection, or certification.