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About this tool
Work out how often your kitchen chimney filters need cleaning, when the next service is due and whether its suction suits your kitchen.
The Chimney Cleaning Planner sets your kitchen chimney's filter-cleaning interval from the grease it actually collects rather than from a fixed calendar rule. It measures cooking load as hours a day multiplied by frying intensity and burners running under the hood, divides that into the filter's grease capacity, and schedules filter cleans, charcoal replacement, deep service and duct cleaning. It also sizes the required suction from your kitchen's volume using the 10–20 air-changes-per-hour rule.
Open Chimney Cleaning Planner on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Two homes with the same chimney get different schedules because they fry different amounts.
Enter the last clean and get the next six dates you can put straight into a calendar.
Kitchen volume, air changes and the manufacturer minimum are combined into one number to compare against the spec sheet.
Baffle filters need cleaning roughly every 30 days at typical Indian cooking loads of about 1.5 hours a day on two burners, dropping to about 15 days with heavy frying. Aluminium mesh or cassette filters clog twice as fast, and a filterless model's oil collector cup needs emptying every 30–40 days.
Soak the plates for 20–30 minutes in very hot water with caustic soda, dishwasher powder or a strong degreaser, then brush along the channels and rinse. Switch the chimney off at the wall first, let the filters cool, wear gloves with caustic soda, and refit only when completely dry.
Size it so the hood replaces the kitchen's air 10–20 times an hour depending on how much you fry, subject to a practical floor of about 800 m³/hr for regular Indian cooking and 1,000 m³/hr for heavy frying. For a 10 × 8 × 10 ft kitchen the air-change figure works out around 340 m³/hr, so the practical minimum governs.
About every six months at typical loads, and sooner with heavy frying. Charcoal filters only exist in ductless recirculating chimneys, where they absorb odour instead of exhausting it, and they cannot be washed and reused — a spent set simply stops removing smell.