Compliance Marketing for Ventilation Engineers
The enforcement here is commercial, not legal
The penalty is not a fine. It is an unpaid claim
- £6,625Commercial kitchen extract system to DW172
- £2,390MVHR system installation
- £515Ventilation duct clean
- £420Bathroom extractor to Part F
- £295Kitchen extract fan
Most compliance marketing works because somebody can be prosecuted. Yours largely does not, and that is the thing to understand before writing a word of it.
Grease-laden ductwork in a commercial kitchen is a well-understood fire risk, and cleaning to the frequencies set out in TR19 is a widely used benchmark for dealing with it. But the pressure on the customer usually arrives from their insurer rather than from an inspector. Policies commonly require ductwork cleaning at stated intervals with certification to prove it, and the moment that bites is after a fire, when a claim is being assessed and somebody asks for the records.
That changes the pitch entirely. You are not helping somebody avoid a fine. You are helping them stay insured — and the consequence of getting it wrong is not a penalty, it is a restaurant that burns down and does not get paid out.
Almost nobody in this trade says that plainly on their website, and it is by some distance the most persuasive thing available to you.
What that looks like as marketing rather than as paperwork
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Lead with the insurance position.
A page explaining what a policy typically asks for, what certification proves and what happens at claim stage is the highest-converting thing a ventilation company can publish.
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Sell the certificate, not the clean.
The deliverable is evidence — pre and post-clean photographs, verified measurements, a dated certificate — because that is what the customer needs to produce when it matters.
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Make the frequency question answerable.
Cleaning intervals vary with how heavily a kitchen is used, and a customer told “annually” for a site that fries all day has been given the wrong answer. Explaining how the assessment works is expertise made visible.
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Cover the domestic side properly and separately.
Part F ventilation on new work, and MVHR at £2,390 in better-insulated homes, is a different customer with a comfort and condensation problem rather than an insurance one.
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Own the design standards where you work to them.
DW172 for kitchen ventilation and DW144 for ductwork are how a specifier tells whether you are serious.
The ratio
One commercial kitchen extract installation is £6,625. Our Booked package is £99 a month — £1,188 a year. That job covers more than five years.
The recurring number is the more interesting one. A duct clean at £515 on a schedule set by usage, across sixty kitchens, is a book of work that renews on a rhythm the customer’s insurer effectively enforces. Winning it once and never missing a due date is worth more than any campaign, and missing dates is the only reliable way to lose it.
What we’d actually build
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An insurance and compliance page
Explaining what policies commonly require and what happens at claim stage, which is the argument nobody else is making.
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A certification page
Showing what your evidence pack contains, because that is the product.
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A frequency guide
Explaining how usage drives cleaning intervals, so a customer can work out where they sit.
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A domestic ventilation section
Covering Part F, condensation and MVHR, written for a homeowner rather than a facilities manager.
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Specifier content
Naming the standards you work to, for the architects and consultants who select on exactly that.
What good looks like at twelve months
- The insurance argument is made explicitly on the site
- Every clean produces a certificate the customer can find later
- Cleaning intervals are set by usage and prompted automatically
- Domestic and commercial arrive through separate routes
- Specifiers can see the standards you work to without ringing
The mistakes we see most
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Selling cleaning as hygiene.
It is a fire and insurance question, and framing it as cleanliness loses to whoever is cheapest.
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One frequency for every kitchen.
A heavy-use site cleaned annually is under-served and a light-use one is over-sold. Both are avoidable.
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No evidence pack.
Without photographs, measurements and a dated certificate the work is unprovable at exactly the moment proof matters.
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Mixing domestic and commercial on one page.
A homeowner with condensation and a chef with an insurance condition need entirely different pages.
The first ninety days
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Weeks 1–4
The insurance and certification pages published, and every commercial site loaded with its usage category and cleaning interval.
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Weeks 5–8
The evidence pack standardised so every clean produces the same provable output, and the frequency guide live.
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Weeks 9–12
Due dates prompting ahead of time, and the domestic route separated with its own content.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Each kitchen carries its usage category and cleaning interval, so the due date is a record rather than a note in a diary.
Pre and post-clean photographs attach to the job, which means the certificate assembles from the visit instead of being written up afterwards from memory.
And a site that has slipped past its interval is flagged, because that gap is the customer’s exposure and your lost renewal at the same time.
The market that arrived without a regulation
Everything above works because somebody else is applying pressure — an insurer, a specifier, a standard. There is one part of this trade where the demand appeared on its own, and it is the part most ventilation companies still have no page for.
Indoor air quality stopped being a specialist concern several years ago. Schools, offices, gyms, surgeries and village halls now have people in them who ask whether the room is ventilated, and a meaningful number of buildings have bought CO2 monitors and discovered they have a problem. Nothing obliges them to act on it. They act anyway, because the readings are visible and somebody has to answer for them.
That is an unusual and rather good position to sell into. There is no deadline, so there is no rush and no adversarial framing. There is a number on a wall going the wrong way, a building manager who cannot explain it, and very few companies offering to.
The content is straightforward and almost uncontested: what CO2 readings actually indicate, why a room can feel stuffy while the windows are open, what can be improved by adjusting existing plant before anything is bought, and what a proper assessment involves. It reaches buildings with no insurer breathing down their neck and no standard to comply with — which means it reaches a market your competitors’ entire marketing strategy is structurally incapable of speaking to.
Questions ventilation engineers ask
Is duct cleaning a legal requirement? Fire safety duties apply to the premises generally, and TR19 is a widely used benchmark for how to discharge them for ductwork. In practice the pressure usually comes from the insurance policy, which is a more concrete argument to make.
How often should a kitchen be cleaned? It depends on hours of use and cooking type. Publishing how that assessment works is more useful than publishing a single interval.
Do customers care about DW172? End customers do not. Specifiers and consultants absolutely do, and they are choosing from a shortlist.
Is domestic MVHR worth pursuing? It is a growing market with better margins than extractor fans, but it is a different customer and it needs its own content.
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