The practice

What we do, in one paragraph

Updraft Mechanical Co. is a four-person commercial kitchen exhaust shop. We service the hood, the grease duct, the exhaust fan, the makeup-air unit, and the dampers that connect them. We do this on a 90-day quarterly cycle for restaurants, food halls, and ghost-kitchen operators in Greater Houston. Every visit ends with a stamped NFPA-96 field record, time-stamped before/after photographs, and a UL-300 nozzle-map cross-check.

How the shop is built

The shop sits in a 3,200-square-foot bay on Navigation Boulevard, a half-mile west of the Navigation Esplanade. We share the building with a sign-printer and a custom-cabinet maker. The bay holds two vans, a low-profile pressure-washer trailer, a parts cage, an air-balancing kit, and a small office where we file paperwork and brew the only coffee we drink. There is no showroom and no salesperson. If you're standing in the office, someone there knows the inside of your hood.

The work is split into routes. A route is one technician, one van, one quarter, and an average of fourteen restaurants. The route owner walks every hood on intake, runs the service, files the record, and signs the operator portal. Routes are not auctioned out. We do not subcontract the cleaning of a hood we put our name on.

The five things we believe

One. A hood is a piece of life-safety equipment. It carries grease-laden vapor at temperatures that, if anything goes wrong, will ignite the residue inside it. Treat it like a panel breaker, not a hood vent.

Two. A clean record beats a clean opinion. We photograph the plenum at four corners and the duct at every vertical-run access panel. The photographs are dated, geotagged, and signed by the crew member who took them. If the AHJ asks, we have a packet.

Three. Negative pressure at the hood plane is the design goal. Negative pressure at the dining-room door is a costly mistake. The makeup-air unit is the half of the system most operators forget about, and we will spend an hour with a manometer on a route we are otherwise paid for ninety minutes.

Four. Houston Code §47-512(b) says the trap is pumped quarterly. We do not pump traps — that is the registered transporter's job — but we know the maths and the waiver clause. If your trap can wait six months and the math holds, we will help you file the waiver. If it can't, we won't.

Five. The dispatch desk holds the calendar, not the operator. Operators in Houston run on a one-to-four-week notice horizon. We hold the 90-day horizon for them.

Founding, briefly

Updraft was founded in early 2021 by Marisol Quiñones and Dale Hesso, two former route technicians at a regional fire-protection company who were dissatisfied with the pace at which inspection records were filed and the pace at which corners were turned. We took on twelve restaurants in the first quarter, twenty-eight by the end of year one, and forty-six by spring of 2026. The growth has been deliberate. We will not take a forty-seventh client until we hire a fifth crew member, planned for summer 2026.

You can read more about the people on the team page, see what we have closed out on the field records shelf, and watch the season as it advances.

What it costs

A quarterly contract runs $360 per hood per visit for one to two-hood operators, $310 per hood for three-to-five-hood operators, and $260 per hood for food halls and ghost-kitchen halls of six or more hoods. Solid-fuel hoods on a monthly cleaning cycle (per NFPA 96 §11.6.1) are quoted separately. We do not charge for the walkthrough.

Travel inside Loop 610 is included. Beltway 8 is a $40 trip charge per visit. Outside the Beltway, we will quote the trip on a per-mile basis or decline.