The bracket, in retrospect
Q1 closed on schedule with 18 routes complete and 18 routes signed off. Three new clients onboarded mid-quarter. One client off-boarded at their request after closing the restaurant.
What was hard
The mid-January cold front. Houston dropped into the high 20s for a 36-hour stretch in week three, which brought four of our clients' rooftop makeup-air units onto emergency low-stage operation. Two of those four had outdoor dampers that froze in the closed position and pulled the dining room into −0.04 in. w.c. relative to outside — well past the comfort threshold and into the territory where the kitchen door pulls closed on its own. We did emergency damper service on all four within 18 hours.
This is also the second consecutive Q1 in which Houston has had a multi-day hard freeze. We will be quoting our Q4 2026 winterization service to add a damper-linkage check and a heating-coil bypass test as standard items, not optional add-ons.
What was good
Big Sun BBQ's three-day recommission (see FR-2026-031). The Westchase ghost-kitchen hall coming online in January with a full Updraft commissioning package (see FR-2026-022). A capture-and-containment certification clean-sweep across all 18 hoods we tested this quarter; no failures.
What we filed
43 quarterly cleaning records. 12 capture-and-containment certifications. 18 makeup-air balancing readings. 11 grease-trap manifests with the city. Three Notice of Waiver applications under §47-512(b) — all approved.
What we learned
Three things. One: the cold-snap MUA-damper failure is going to keep happening; it is now an annual feature of Houston winters. Two: the new digital-documentation language in NFPA-96 (2025) is generating more new-client inbound than any change in the last three years. Three: our records storage budget is going up in Q2 — we have crossed an inflection point on photo-archive size and need to shift retention to colder cloud storage. No operator-facing change.