Viking range and range hood cleaning

Viking hoods: mesh vs baffle, and the older blowers

Most Viking Professional hoods carry stainless baffle filters; the smaller under-cabinet models and some older wall hoods carry aluminum mesh. The difference decides how we clean them. Baffles trap grease in their channels and come clean with steam and time; mesh loads faster, cleans faster, and dents if you look at it wrong.

Behind either one sits the blower, and on an older Viking it’s a heavy piece. The wheel is a squirrel cage held on the motor shaft with a set screw, and after years of cooking the grease on it is thick enough to throw it out of balance. We pull the wheel, steam it on its own, wipe out the housing, and seat it back so it spins true.

The hood in the photo above is a Viking wall hood over a Bertazzoni range, baffles showing underneath, which is a normal kitchen for us: nobody buys one brand for everything. If the hood is the only thing on your list, the complete hood, blower and duct job is laid out on its own page.

Viking ranges: open burners and the porcelain-enamel interior

Open burners are the Viking difference. On a sealed-burner range a boil-over stays on the cooktop; on a Viking it goes through the grate into the drip tray under the burner, out of sight, where the next preheat bakes it hard. So the trays come out first, and they’re usually the worst part of the range. The grates come off, the burner heads get brushed and their ports cleared so the flame is even again, and the trays get steamed and detailed.

Then the oven. Viking’s cavity is porcelain enamel, which takes steam well, and up in the roof of it sits the infrared broiler. That element is a ceramic plaque, and the one rule is that it never gets soaked: the broiler gets a dry brush while the walls, the floor and the door get the steam.

Honestly, a Viking oven that’s been self-cleaned for years tends to look fine on the walls and bad on the door, because the cycle never reaches between the panes of the glass.

Signs a Viking hood is past due

The fan sounds wrong. That’s the first sign, and it’s usually the blower wheel thrown out of balance by grease. The second is a drip: grease coming off the lower edge of a baffle onto the cooktop, or a tacky film along the hood’s front edge where your hand rests. The third is time. A hood that hasn’t been opened in ten years has ten years in it, whatever it looks like from below. One hood the team opened was that old, and the owner said what we’d say:

“…cleaned my 10 year old semi professional vent hood - inside and out looks BRAND NEW!”

That’s a Google review of NY NJ Hoods, our commercial sister company, run by the same team.

The reason not to wait is simple. Cooking is the leading cause of home fires in the United States, according to the National Fire Protection Association’s home cooking fire research, and a hood loaded with grease hangs directly over the flame. Cleaning it reduces grease buildup and fire risk in the one place in the house where both live.

The grease behind the control panel

Every Viking knob pulls off. Behind each one is a bezel and a strip of stainless that catches whatever runs over the front edge of the cooktop, and nobody has cleaned it since the range was installed, because nobody knew it came apart. We pull the knobs, clean the stems and bezels, and detail the whole panel before the knobs go back on in order.

The hood has the same problem in miniature: the switch strip on the front lip of a Viking hood sits right in the rising grease, and the lens over the lights yellows from the inside. Both get opened and cleaned by hand. It’s fiddly work, and in our experience it’s the part owners point at first when we’re done, because a clean panel is the difference between a range that looks cleaned and one that looks new.

Booking the hood and the range together

As far as grease is concerned the hood and the range are one machine, so doing both in one visit is simply how it should go: the counters get covered once, the knobs come off once, and the drip trays and the baffles are dealt with while the kitchen is already apart. Wash the mesh or the baffles yourself in between; how we handle mesh and baffle filters covers what a dishwasher does to each type.

No two Viking kitchens are in the same state. A weekend kitchen, or a second home closed half the year, is a different animal from a range that sears four nights a week, and we’ll say what we find after the first visit rather than sell you a schedule. Viking ranges show up in large older homes west of the city as often as in waterfront kitchens on the North Shore. The other pro brands we clean each get the same kind of page. Give us a call and tell us what’s over the range; a Viking hood over somebody else’s range is fine, most kitchens are mixed.