Equipment maintenance schedules for cafés and restaurants: the boring routine that saves you a closure

The espresso machine at Welsh Back died at 09:14 on the Saturday of August bank holiday. Two group heads, both refusing to pull pressure. We had a queue that ran out the door towards the harbour, two staff on bar, and a delivery of pastries that had landed twenty minutes earlier. The engineer who eventually came out on the Sunday told us the pump motor had been on its way out for weeks. He also told us, gently, that the service reminder for that exact machine had been sitting in our inbox since the start of the month.

I worked it out later. We did roughly £4,200 less trade across that weekend than the previous bank holiday. The service would have cost £180. The motor itself was £340. The lost revenue, the staff sent home, the customer who tweeted that we were "shambolic", all of it traced back to an email nobody actioned.

This guide is the boring list I wish I'd had pinned to the office wall in 2010. The annual statutory stuff, the things your insurer will quietly check if you ever claim, and the five-minute daily checks that catch problems before they cost you a weekend.

Why this matters

Maintenance sits in the bit of running a café nobody talks about. It is not on Instagram. It does not generate revenue. It is the cost you only really feel when it goes wrong, which is also when it costs four or five times what the service would have. The chiller running warm at 6 on a Friday is the same chiller you ignored a slight clicking noise from in March.

There is the legal side too. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 you have to keep extraction systems clean and safe. Under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 commercial gas appliances need an annual check by a Gas Safe engineer on the commercial register. PUWER 1998 covers work equipment generally. Your EHO will not normally ask to see every certificate at a routine inspection, but the moment something goes wrong, an injury, a fire, a food poisoning case, those certificates are the first thing your insurer and the council will ask for. If you do not have them, your insurance is, in practical terms, void.

The annual list, in order of how much it hurts when you skip it

These are the five things every café or restaurant kitchen needs on a calendar with a real owner attached. Not "the manager will sort it". A named person, a date, and a place the certificate gets filed.

Gas safety check (annual, legally required)

Every commercial gas appliance, your ovens, hobs, salamanders, water heater if gas-fired, needs an annual inspection by an engineer on the Gas Safe commercial register. Note: commercial. A domestic Gas Safe engineer cannot legally sign off your kitchen, and a lot of operators get this wrong. You get a CP42 certificate at the end of it. File it. Your landlord will want a copy, your insurer will want a copy, and if you ever have a gas-related incident the HSE will want to see it within about ten minutes.

Cost in 2024 was roughly £180 to £350 for a small kitchen, more if you have a lot of appliances. Book it for the same week every year so you do not forget.

PAT testing (typically annual for kitchen equipment)

PAT, Portable Appliance Testing, covers everything with a plug. Toasters, blenders, the espresso grinder, the microwave, the ice machine if it plugs in rather than being hardwired. The HSE does not actually mandate a specific frequency, it talks about risk-based intervals, but in a wet, hot, constantly-used kitchen the sensible interval is twelve months. Some insurers will specify annual in the policy wording. Read your policy.

A PAT tester will charge per item, usually £1 to £2, with a minimum call-out. Budget £150 to £300 for a typical café. You get a register of every item with a pass/fail and a little green sticker. Keep the register, the stickers fall off into the fryer eventually.

Extraction system cleaning (TR19 Grease, varies by use)

This is the one that gets people. TR19 Grease is the BESA standard your insurer almost certainly references in the small print. The cadence depends on how heavy your cooking is:

• Light use (under 6 hours a day): every 12 months
• Medium use (6 to 12 hours a day): every 6 months
• Heavy use (12+ hours a day, or anything with a lot of frying): every 3 months

A proper TR19 clean does the canopy, the filters, the ductwork all the way to the fan on the roof, and the fan itself. You get a report with photos and a deposit-thickness reading. If you have a fire and your duct work has not been cleaned to TR19 standard, expect your claim to be reduced or refused.

Refrigeration service (every 6 to 12 months)

Commercial fridges and chillers should be serviced at least annually, twice a year if they are working hard or in a hot kitchen. A service is not the same as wiping the gasket. The engineer cleans the condenser coils (the bit that gets clogged with grease and flour and slowly cooks the compressor), checks gas pressures, tests the thermostat, and looks at the door seals. A service is £80 to £150. A new compressor is £600 plus. A walk-in chiller failing on a Friday with £2,000 of prep inside it is its own kind of bad day.

Grease interceptor / drain maintenance (quarterly to annually)

If you have a grease trap under the sink or an interceptor in the yard, it needs pumping out on a schedule. How often depends on the volume of fat going through. The first sign you've left it too long is usually a smell, and the second is the drain backing up into your pot wash on a Saturday lunch. Get on a contract with a waste company. Bristol Water and most councils will get involved if you discharge fats into the public sewer, and the fines are not small.

The five-minute daily checks that catch problems early

The annual stuff stops disasters. The daily stuff stops the annual stuff from becoming necessary in the first place. None of these take more than thirty seconds. All of them should be on the opening or closing checklist.

• Fridge and freezer temperatures: every fridge gets read with the built-in thermometer at open and close. Under 5°C for fridges, under -18°C for freezers. Anything drifting up by 2 degrees over a few days is a condenser starting to clog or a seal starting to go.
• Probe thermometer check: a quick calibration in iced water (should read 0 to 1°C). Five seconds. If it's off, you've been recording wrong temperatures on your due diligence.
• Oven pilot and gas smell check: open the oven, look at the flame colour (should be blue, not yellow), have a sniff near the connections. Yellow flames or any gas smell, turn it off and ring the engineer.
• Ice machine bin and scoop: empty the bin, wash the scoop, check the drain isn't backing up. Ice machines are the single most common source of contamination findings I've seen on EHO reports.
• Extraction canopy filters: a glance at the grease level. If they're dripping, they should have been washed yesterday. Most filters are dishwasher-safe and want doing weekly minimum.
• Coffee machine groups and steam wand: backflush daily, descale on the manufacturer's schedule. A descale at the right interval is £0. A new boiler is £900.

How to actually make the schedule stick

Knowing the list is not the problem. The problem is that the certificates live in five different inboxes, the engineer texts the manager who is now at a different pub, and the renewal date is buried in a PDF nobody opens. Here is what worked for us in the last couple of years at Welsh Back:

One shared calendar with every service date on it, set to remind the named owner four weeks before. A physical folder behind the office door with the current certificates in plastic sleeves, in the order an EHO would ask for them: gas, PAT, TR19, fridge service, pest control, water hygiene. And a single line item in the weekly manager meeting: "anything due in the next month?" If the answer is no, move on. If the answer is yes, the booking gets made that day, not next week.

The other thing worth saying: get on planned-preventative contracts with your engineers wherever you can. The refrigeration company that already knows your kit, has the part numbers in their van, and answers the phone on a Saturday is worth more than the cheapest quote you'll get from Google.

Common mistakes

• Treating PAT testing as a tick-box: doing it once when you open and never again. The kettle that's been dropped six times and lives next to the sink is the one that'll trip the RCD on a busy lunch.
• Confusing a domestic Gas Safe engineer with a commercial one: only engineers on the commercial register can legally certify your kitchen. Check the back of their card.
• Skipping TR19 because "the kitchen porter wipes the filters": filters are not the duct. The fire risk lives in the run of ductwork between your canopy and the roof, where nobody can see it.
• Letting fridge servicing slide because "it's working fine": by the time a commercial fridge is visibly struggling, the compressor has already been cooking for months. Annual service, always.
• Filing certificates in the manager's personal email: the manager will leave. The email will close. The EHO will visit the week after.
• Booking everything in the same month: spreading services across the year is kinder to cash flow and means you're not relying on one engineer to save four pieces of kit in one week.