-TheSmoking Rags

– The Smoking Rags

Hood cleaning takes a lot of rags. Mountains of them. We’d wash our own, dry our own, and think nothing of it. Just part of the business. But the chemicals we used were highly combustible, and we learned the hard way what that meant.

One morning, we came into the office and found the place covered in an oily smoke film. Turns out, someone had pulled a load of rags out of the dryer, stuffed them still hot into a milk crate, and left them overnight. They smoldered in that pile like a slow burn campfire. By the time we showed up, the office was coated in greasy silt — computers, desks, every surface. It was disgusting.

But that wasn’t the worst. Another time, the same thing happened, only this time it didn’t stop at smoldering. The rags ignited inside the dryer, fire shot through the vent, and into the structure of the building itself. We had a MAVAS alarm fire on our hands which is a huge fire deployment. The whole building went down because of a dryer full of hood cleaning rags.

That’s how we learned a very expensive lesson: never, ever stuff freshly dried rags into a pile. When they come out of the dryer, you throw them on the floor, spread them out on the concrete, and let them cool off. It may look messy, but it saves buildings.

Over the years, I’ve heard this same story from other hood cleaning companies all over the country. Fires from smoking rags aren’t rare — they’re common. And once you’ve had one, you never forget it.

The moral? Be careful of your rags. They may look harmless, but they’ll burn your whole business down if you let them.