A kitchen hood suppression system has to be designed around the specific appliances it protects, which means there is no such thing as a generic installation. A new restaurant build starts from a blank hood and an equipment schedule. A renovation usually means an existing system sized for a cooking line that no longer matches what is actually installed. And a meaningful share of the installations we do are replacements: systems installed before 1994 under the older UL 300A standard, which no longer meets current code and will not pass a modern AHJ inspection regardless of how well it has been maintained.
Each of these situations calls for the same underlying work. We inventory every appliance under the hood, determine nozzle count and placement against the manufacturer’s listed appliance coverage, size the agent tank to the hazard, and design the detection and actuation layout to match. The result is a system engineered for the kitchen in front of us, not a standard package applied to whatever hood happens to be there.
Installation also has to be coordinated with trades that are not fire protection contractors. Gas shutoff requires a mechanical connection at the gas line, electrical shutoff requires coordination with the kitchen’s electrical panel, and system monitoring typically ties into the building’s fire alarm panel. We manage that coordination directly rather than leaving it for the general contractor to sort out between subs.