Big Sun BBQ, Spring Branch
A barbecue kitchen with offset-pit cooking, closed for 18 months, brought back to first-permit condition: hood, duct, makeup-air, and a complete suppression-system pretest.
FR-2026-031 · Recommission after 18 months closed
The closure
Big Sun BBQ closed in October 2024 after the original owners retired. The building sat through two summers without operating. New owners — a family group that runs two other barbecue kitchens elsewhere in Texas — bought the lease in early 2026 and asked us to bring the system back to first-permit condition. The kitchen reopened on April 8, 2026.
What you find in a kitchen that has sat
Three things, in order of seriousness. One: creosote in the duct riser. Big Sun runs an offset-pit, which is solid-fuel cooking under a Type I hood, and creosote — the heavy, sticky residue from incomplete combustion of wood — does not evaporate or degrade in two summers. We measured 6.1 mm of creosote at the worst point on the vertical run, which is well past the NFPA-96 threshold and into "ignition risk if heated" territory. Two: rodent nesting in the makeup-air ductwork. Two summers is enough. We pulled the affected sections, cleaned, and reinstalled. Three: a sun-rotted curb seal on the rooftop fan, which had let approximately two cubic feet of rainwater into the duct over eighteen months. The water was long gone but the corrosion line on the duct interior was not.
What we did
A three-day recommission. Day one: full hood, plenum, and filter cleaning. Day two: vertical and horizontal duct cleaning, with two new access panels cut into a section that the original installer had welded shut. Day three: makeup-air balancing, fan service, curb-seal replacement, and a coordinated suppression-system pretest with the operator's chosen TDI-licensed extinguisher company. The hood was capture-and-containment tested with smoke pencil and SmokeGen on day three afternoon, passed cleanly, and stickered.
Dale Hesso + Marisol Quiñones · 2026-04-04 · 16:30 CT
Three-day recommission · Suppression pretest passed · System stickered
What the operator paid
$8,640 for the recommission, including the new access panels, the curb-seal replacement, and the manometer-and-balancing time. Not including the new spark-arrestor screen ($80) and the makeup-air linkage rebuild ($240). The new owners had budgeted $12,000 for the work; we came in well under, which is what we always aim for on a job we have quoted up-front.
What the kitchen looks like now
The first quarterly cleaning is scheduled for July 2026. The owners have been on every standard cleaning protocol since reopen and are tracking on schedule. The first capture-and-containment cert is on the books for spring 2027.