BESA updates kitchen ventilation guidance
The Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) has revised and updated its industry guidance document for kitchen ventilation design.
The 2018 version of the Specification for Kitchen Ventilation Systems (DW/172) includes changes to relevant legislation designed to help ventilation engineers work with the latest cooking techniques and catering equipment.
These include an expanded and modified coefficient schedule to provide ventilation system designers with a fuel coefficient for a range of gas and electric appliances. This is then multiplied by the area of the equipment to produce the appropriate airflow for design purposes.
The revised publication also contains a new sections on solid fuel equipment and recirculation ventilation, an updated lighting section and updates to the cleaning and maintenance schedules.
New information on ‘demand controlled’ kitchen ventilation reflects the increasing use of smart technologies, while modifications to the guidance on pollution control reflect new thinking on indoor air quality and the level of permissible toxins in breathable air.
The review was completed by the BESA Ventilation Group.
Peter Rogers, chairman of BESA’s Ventilation Group technical committee, says: “As well as the new information contained in the revision, all the existing sections have been revised and updated in the hope that DW/172 will continue to be widely used by all parts of the catering industry.”
The update to DW/172 follows the launch earlier this year of an independently verified standard for the planned maintenance of catering equipment, which was built into BESA’s SFG20 planned maintenance tool.