Kitchen Ceiling Cladding in a Restaurant

[Maz123]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone can point me to a decent product for cladding a ceiling in a kitchen.
They want it white and easy to clean and obviously it'll get fairly hot in the kitchen...I've been googling but there's just so much and a lot of it seems to be residential so not sure it's suitable. My head hurts so any help much appreciated.

Thanks

[arco_iris]

Not quite the same, but don't see why it wouldn't fulfil the "easy clean" aspect - I have a room 8m x 4.9m, housing a heated swimming pool, and the ceiling is clad with upvc soffit boards. 300mm x 3 planks type.

Not attempted to investigate, but given that these boards (which come in 5m lengths) do not sag, and show no joins, then they must be tacked on the grooves with the tongues hiding the fixings.

They have been in place since 2004 (15 years) and are spotless.

[OchAye]

My immediate thought is that it should be fire resistant. Why do they want cladding? Is the ceiling in poor state of repair and does not pass hygiene rules; too high and not easy to clean so they are looking for a suspended ceiling?

[Maz123]

They want cladding as ceiling it fairly poor and not foat (has 2 boxed in steels) and they also want new lighting that if installed on existing ceiling will proteude also, making cleaning more difficult.
The ides is to install a new flat ceiling so lights are flush and cover with cladding to make cleaning easy.

[Job and Knock]

I was wondering if anyone can point me to a decent product for cladding a ceiling in a kitchen. They want it white and easy to clean and obviously it'll get fairly hot in the kitchen...

Well I do a lot of work in that sector (interior fit-out on restaurants, bars, pubs, coffee shops, shops, etc) and have done for years. In the last few years a lot of the kitchens I've worked on have been metal framed and single skin 15mm FR plasterboard (pink, fire-rated) with a skim of plaster then just washable gloss paint. Insulated above and all steels above painted with several coats of intumescent paint

Where we've been working to timber joists it's often been double overlapped layers of 12mm FR board, skimmed and painted (first layer fire-stopped with intumescent caulk or Firestop in the joints).

Some kitchens, such as a £3.5m restaurant fit-out I was on in Manchester last year, specify a suspended grid ceiling with a fire-proof tile - in those lighting, etc is supported using plywood pattresses above the ceiling times (which are typically 600 x 600mm) and 600 x 600 or 1200 x 600 flame-proof lighting grids are readily available. This system has the advantage that damaged tiles can be speedily replaced and periodically the tiles and grid can simply be resprayed (just done some repairs on a 10 year old commercial kitchen this week where they immediately resprayed the lot afterwards - looks quite good, too), or just the grid resprayed and new tiles installed relatively quickly. In this type of ceiling all heavy weights are supported from the steels or joists above, often using Unistrut and threaded rod to carry very heavy weights

Lastly some more industrial kitchens (i.e food processors) go for cement board with chamfered edges and again Firestop in the joints. This is often painted white afterwards. They are a swine to install lighting into, however.

Not quite the same, but don't see why it wouldn't fulfil the "easy clean" aspect - I have a room 8m x 4.9m, housing a heated swimming pool, and the ceiling is clad with upvc soffit boards. 300mm x 3 planks type.

And in the hot, greasy environment of a commercial I also suspect that they'd discolour quite quicky. However my greatest concern is that PVCu burns readily and can give off acrid (and poisonous) black smoke in a fire making it an absolute no-no for a commercial kitchen environment. In a domestic kitchen you might have 6 to 8kW of gas burner operational - in the Manchester job I mentioned earlier there are no less that four 15kW pan rings, plus two 30kW tandoors, and that's before we get to the griddle, or conventional ranges. Fire is an ever present danger. Some idea of the difference between domestic and commercial can be gauged from the fact that almost all new commercial installations these days have heat recovery systems which supply the establishment with hot water for dish washing and the customer toilets