On Blowing Powder

Phil Ackland

KEC Expert
Sounds like Matt and Chris are blowing smoke. Would smoke be counted as powder or foam?

Many years ago, back when powder was in (before pressure washers!) I developed a "powder" that was actually a soap. We would spray it up into the duct and left it. The next time we came back, we hosed (as in garden) the duct down and it came out like a new penny. This was particularly good with Chinese. This was just getting good when the No Powder rule came down. Too bad.

Thoughts?
 
If you were to clean a hood to 96 standards and sprayed the soap coating in the vertical, could this step save hours on the next service? Clearly you can't coat with powder, but nothing states you can't use a soap agent.
 
To go back in time, we were just developing this when the ban came.

It was too much hassle to fight the impression that you were still blowing powder.

The marketing to make this "soap" a success would require (at the least) that the stuff be UL listed (that's the best way to get around the "powder" issue) but we felt that even that would just be too expensive and not worth it. The formula is simple and if successful would have easily been knocked off.

The key place where this worked was systems you just couldn't get all the grease out of in a reasonable time (especially first time cleanings). But given the pre-existing attitude of the restaurant industry for regular maintenance and the assumption that exhaust cleaners were too dumb to know what was best for the system were prejudices enough.

Then with the focus on no powder of any kind, it was just too much.

There are only so many windmills to chase.
 
So what do you do with a windmill when you catch it? How much rope does it take to stop the part that goes round and round? If you stop the roundy round part, is that rotating motion transfered to the base?
 
Phil Ackland said:
....But given the pre-existing attitude of the restaurant industry for regular maintenance and the assumption that exhaust cleaners were too dumb to know what was best for the system were prejudices enough.

I think that still may be true.....there is at least 1 guy here in LA still blowing powder.:eek:
 
in 1994, the NFPA, required that the duct not be coated with powder or any other substance.
 
As I recall, its the same. I didn't bring my laptop home for the weekend, so I will look on Monday.
 
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