What Cannot Be Un-Seen

May the grease of a thousand meals infest your vent fan -- ancient restaurateur's curse

One word: yuck.

After sitting outside in pieces for almost four years, it was time to reinstall the kitchen vent fan. This is the thing that sucks kitchen fumes out of the commercial kitchen, like an industrial-sized version of your average hood vent.

Except that the duct is 14 inches in diameter, the fan is the size of a fifth-grader, and the motor that drives it has more horsepower than my first car. The whole thing weighs about 40 pounds, and that's not counting the grease.

The grease . Oh, the grease.

Neither the fan nor any of the ductwork had been cleaned in at least ten years, which is sort of okay, because it hadn't been used in the last six. But imagine a full-service restaurant, cooking steaks and chops and fish and chicken and who-knows-what, every evening, night after night, for years. Imagine what goes up the hood vent in all that time. And imagine where it stays.

Now imagine cleaning it. I did, but the reality was still a surprise. Old grease gets really hard and black and sticky. It laughs at Dawn and normal household cleaners. So Kathy and I went to the local restaurant-supply place and got a gallon of the good stuff. At first, we picked up a big bottle labeled stove and oven cleaner, but the owner of the store said, "Oh, no. THIS is what you want," and pointed to a different bottle. "Use gloves. And a mask."

Okay then... we're talking industrial-strength cleaner.

Even so, the grease put up a valiant fight. You pour the solvent on full-strength (no dilution) and let it sit for 20-30 minutes. The grease starts to bubble a little bit. That's how you know you don't want to touch it. Then you scrape the resulting goo off and... uh, where am I supposed to put this stuff?

Fun fact: The brush I was using to spread solvent now has no bristles. They got shorter and shorter as I worked, and now they're just... gone.

This is sort of like stripping paint, but with a worse smell. Like paint stripper, the grease solvent doesn't really make the old grease dissolve and liquefy, it just makes it sticky and gooey and marginally easier to scrape off. It turns old grease into the consistency of honey, because of course honey is so easy to remove, right?

And it makes a big, sticky, biodegradable mess. I worked over a tarp in the backyard, which (in hindsight) added the complication of blowing sand. Cleaning sand out of the honey-coated machinery made it a perfect day.

I've burned through the entire gallon of solvent and barely managed to clean everything once. The fan turns freely now, and without throwing off chunks of beef fat. I had to rebuild the AC motor, but that wasn't terrible. Now I need a fan belt to connect the motor to the fan, because the old one was rotted. I figure any ol' belt will do, so I'll see what's on sale down at the auto parts store. I hope they'll let me in.