Hi Brad:
You stated; Today we went into our South location and draped plastic sheeting off of the oven hood near the back corners in an effort to trap the heat that manages to escape into the room. It looks totally ridiculous but I’ll be darned if the plan didn’t work. Temperature dropped in the rear of the kitchen from about 90 degrees yesterday to an oh-so-comfortable-by-comparison 80 degrees this afternoon.
We’re thinking a permanent (and easy) solution would be to hang some “freezer curtains” in the problem spots.
Sometimes those axial fans that circulate the ambient air away from the fan motors can eject a lot of heat into the room. Ours have deflectors on them but it still isn’t quite enough.
Response:
Re fan motors ejecting a lot of air into the room.
If hot air is blowing from your oven into the room your hood is probably not properly designed, the hood exhaust fan fan is not properly designed and the make up air unit, if you have one, is not properly designed.
Re freezer curtains hanging around the hood to contain heat. That concept enjoyed a spate of popularity many years ago. Its like, “there is a hole in the boat water is coming in, drill another hole in the boat to let the water out”.
As I recall there were some warranty problems for equipment thus confined. You should have an unrestricted flow of air around your oven. Again if that was an efficacious method of cooling the work area I think that thousands of operators would have adopted it.
We have equipped several thousands of pizza shops. I know of none of them that have curtains around their ovens.
Is there a major chain that uses curtains around their ovens?
George mills