Most of Poland’s restaurant stock is not in new buildings. It is on the ground floor of a kamienica — a pre-war or socialist-era apartment block with a shared staircase, a shared roof and, crucially, a shared ventilation shaft that forty households already believe they own. That single fact decides more Polish kitchen fit-outs than any hood specification, because a restaurant in a tenement has three constraints that a restaurant in a retail park never meets: a shaft it may not be allowed to use, a façade it may not be allowed to pierce, and a winter that turns make-up air into a heating plant.
1. The four documents that govern a Polish installation
Poland regulates kitchen extraction through four separate instruments, and they are enforced by four different people. Understanding which one is asking is the difference between a two-week approval and a six-month argument.
| Instrument | What it controls | Who enforces it |
|---|---|---|
| Prawo budowlane and the Minister of Infrastructure technical conditions | Ventilation design, duct fire resistance, ceiling height below which mechanical ventilation becomes mandatory, protection of the building’s structure | Powiatowy inspektor nadzoru budowlanego (building supervision) at completion |
| PN-83/B-03430 ventilation standard | The design arithmetic most designers still cite: a fresh-air floor of about 30 m³/h per person, kitchen production zones in the range of 10 to 50 air changes per hour, dining rooms at 5 to 10 | Design practice; used as the reference in documentation |
| Sanepid — Państwowa Inspekcja Sanitarna | Hygiene of the kitchen as a workspace: extraction that keeps heat, steam and grease out of food handling areas, plus a documented cleaning regime under EU Regulation 852/2004 and HACCP | Sanepid inspectors, at approval and on complaint |
| Fire regulations and the fire marshal | Fire-rated ductwork, penetration sealing, grease filters, shutdown and suppression, maintenance records | Państwowa Straż Pożarna and the insurer |
Two practical notes on this table. First, Sanepid does not approve a hood; it approves a kitchen, and a duct that cannot be cleaned is a hygiene finding before it is a fire finding. Second, the building supervision inspection happens at the end, which means the fire-rated duct detail has to be right the first time — there is no cheap moment to discover that the cladding was value-engineered out.
2. The shared shaft question, which is where tenement projects die
Polish building rules are explicit on one point that foreign fit-out teams frequently miss: a commercial kitchen’s extract duct may not be connected into the common exhaust riser serving the residential units above, where the restaurant occupies the ground floor of a multi-family building. That prohibition is not a technicality. A residential riser is sized for a bathroom fan, it is not fire-rated for grease, and it discharges into a system the other residents have a legal interest in.
A separate commercial shaft is a different case, and Polish practice allows it — a purpose-built extract riser serving the commercial units — but only with five conditions settled in writing before the first bracket goes in.
- Fire separation. The riser must be fire-rated for the compartment it passes through, with sealed penetrations at every floor; a shaft that carries grease vapour through six residential floors is a life-safety item, not an HVAC item.
- Non-return and independence. Each tenant’s branch needs a backdraught damper, so that a closed unit does not receive another tenant’s smoke, and so that a fire in one unit does not travel through the shaft into a neighbour.
- Metering and cost allocation. Where several tenants share one riser and one roof fan, the fan’s energy, maintenance and cleaning cost has to be split by something defensible — measured running hours, or a fixed share by design airflow. Polish landlords increasingly write this into the lease; operators who do not check it discover the arrangement when the first cleaning invoice arrives.
- Cleaning access and responsibility. A shared shaft needs access doors at each level and a named party responsible for cleaning, with an interval set by trading hours rather than by calendar convenience. If the landlord owns the shaft, the lease should say who cleans it and who pays.
- Odour transfer between cuisines. A shared riser mixes a pierogi kitchen with a kebab counter and a coffee shop. Grease and odour from the heaviest tenant will reach the lightest one, and the lightest one will complain. Where the mix is that uneven, a dedicated branch to roof level is usually cheaper over five years than the disputes.
For the operator signing a lease, the sequence matters more than the detail: ask for the shaft’s as-built drawing and its fire rating before signing, not after the fit-out budget is committed. A shaft that cannot legally take the load is a reason to walk away, and it is the cheapest walk-away available.
3. Sizing: two calculations, and the larger one wins
Polish documentation tends to carry two numbers that disagree, because air-change rates and hood capture velocities are calculated for different purposes. Both should be run, and the design should take the larger.
By air changes. A 30 m² kitchen with a 3.0 m ceiling holds 90 m³ of air. At the middle of the 10 to 50 band — say 20 changes — that is 1,800 m³/h. This figure exists to keep the room habitable: it controls heat, steam and CO₂, and it is the number a Sanepid-minded designer will quote.
By capture. Four burners on a cooking line, at roughly 1,000 m³/h each for a mixed menu, gives 4,000 m³/h. Check it against face velocity: a 4.0 m canopy with a 0.6 m opening presents 2.4 m², so 4,000 m³/h is 1.11 m³/s across that area, or 0.46 m/s — inside the 0.4 to 0.5 m/s band used for gas ranges, woks and chargrills, and above the 0.25 m/s that is enough for induction and steam equipment.
So the room needs 1,800 and the cookline needs 4,000. The system is 4,000, and every downstream number — duct size, fan, filter bank, make-up air, heating — follows from it. This is why a canopy that is larger than the cooking line is not a safety margin but a permanent cost: each extra square metre of opening adds airflow, and each cubic metre of airflow adds duct, plant and winter heat for the life of the restaurant.
4. Winter make-up air: the cost nobody budgets for
This is the Polish-specific number that changes decisions. Make-up air has to replace 80 to 90 percent of what is extracted, and in January it arrives at somewhere near minus 20 °C. Heating it to a comfortable supply temperature is not a small load.
The arithmetic is short. Air carries roughly 0.34 Wh per cubic metre per kelvin. Take 4,000 m³/h of extract, replace 80 percent — 3,200 m³/h — and raise it 40 K from minus 20 to plus 20. That is 0.34 × 3,200 × 40, or about 43.5 kW of heating, before any duct losses. On gas that is a permanent operating cost; on electric resistance it is usually unaffordable, which is why Polish projects lean on heat recovery and on supplied-air tempering rather than on full heating.
| Extract airflow | Make-up at 80% | Heating at 40 K rise | Practical response |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2,000 m³/h | 1,600 m³/h | about 22 kW | Direct-fired or water coil tempering |
| 4,000 m³/h | 3,200 m³/h | about 43 kW | Heat recovery plus tempering; supply at the cookline, not the door |
| 8,000 m³/h | 6,400 m³/h | about 87 kW | Recovery is mandatory in practice; consider a compensated supply plenum |
Two design consequences follow. Make-up air should be delivered into the kitchen, outside the capture zone of the hood — a perforated supply plenum or a low-level displacement arrangement — because air delivered across the cookline destroys the capture the hood was sized for. And where the building will not accept a large heater, the honest move is to reduce extract volume by tightening the canopy to the actual cooking line, not to install a smaller fan and hope.
5. Fire-rated ductwork, and why the cheap version fails inspection
Commercial kitchen extract ducts in Poland are normally required to be fire-rated for the compartments they pass through, either as a purpose-made EI-rated duct or as standard ductwork with external cladding to the required resistance. In a tenement the duct usually passes through two or three residential floors, so the requirement is not theoretical: it is the reason a façade-mounted galvanised spiral is not an acceptable substitute for a properly rated riser.
Four details get inspected, and three of them are usually wrong on the first attempt. The rating has to be continuous through the compartment — a rated duct that stops at the ceiling slab is a rated duct that does not work. Penetrations need Sealing that matches the wall’s rating, with the correct annular gap and depth, photographed on both faces. Access doors must not compromise the rating, which means rated covers rather than a cut hole with a hinged lid. And the grease load has to be managed by cleaning, because a rated duct full of grease is a rated duct with a fuel supply inside it.
Cleaning intervals should follow trading hours, not the calendar: a restaurant open twelve to sixteen hours a day belongs on a quarterly deep clean, six to twelve hours on a six-monthly cycle, and two to six hours annually, with the canopy filters cleaned far more often. What the fire marshal and the insurer both look at is not the interval itself but the evidence that someone followed it — dated records, a named contractor, and photographs of the duct interior rather than an invoice.
6. The façade, the roof and the wspólnota
Two Polish institutions decide whether a flue is possible at all, and neither appears in the ventilation standard.
The first is the conservation officer — konserwator zabytków — where the building sits in a registered area, which in practice means most of central Kraków, Gdańsk, Wrocław and Toruń. A new external flue on a protected façade is not an HVAC decision; it is an architectural one, and the answer is often no regardless of the engineering.
The second is the wspólnota mieszkaniowa, the owners’ association that holds the shared roof, staircase and structure. Roof plant, a new penetration, a visible riser bracket, even a condensate drain: all of these sit on common property and need a resolution, not a phone call. The most reliable sequence in a Polish fit-out is to obtain the shaft drawing, the fire rating and the wspólnota consent before signing the lease, because each of the three can individually make the site unworkable, and all three are cheaper to discover early.
7. Where a flue is simply not available
Some tenement sites have no route at all: an interior unit with no external wall, a basement with a low ceiling, a listed façade that will not take a riser, or a landlord who will not grant a penetration. This is the case for treating the air rather than discharging it, and in Poland it is a legally workable route provided the documentation is honest about what it does.
Three things have to be true. Grease must be captured before the odour stage, because carbon blinded by grease stops working within weeks. The odour stage must be specified by mass and contact time rather than by box count — at 4,000 m³/h, a 0.4-second contact time implies roughly 0.44 m³ of media, which in bulk carbon terms is about 200 to 220 kg, and that mass is what gets changed every few months. And the maintenance regime has to be written into the HACCP documentation, because a recirculating system whose carbon was never changed is a hygiene finding waiting for an inspector.
What recirculation does not do is remove heat and moisture. On a busy line the kitchen still needs general extract for those, so the honest configuration is usually a treated hood over the cookline plus a small general extract elsewhere, not a sealed room with one fan.
8. What Sanepid actually looks at
Sanepid’s interest is the kitchen as a food-handling environment, and the extraction system shows up in seven places. Heat and steam control over the cookline, so that staff are not working in a condensate fog. Grease not dripping onto surfaces or into prepared food. Filters present, fitted correctly and clean enough to be doing their job. Duct and canopy interiors free of accumulated deposits. A documented cleaning frequency with records. Make-up air that does not create draughts across food preparation. And, where the kitchen is open to the dining room, an air balance that keeps cooking air out of the guest zone.
None of this is exotic, and all of it is documentary. The operators who pass without discussion are the ones who can produce a cleaning log with dates and photographs, not the ones with the biggest fan.
9. Where this lands in equipment terms
For a tenement site where the shaft is refused or the flue cannot be built, a self-contained hood that pairs a multi-stage electrostatic cell with a carbon odour stage keeps the compliance inside the appliance rather than inside the building’s shared structure — the ND-series for a fryer-and-grill line with continuous oil load, the N-series for lighter menus where the extract volume is smaller and the winter heating penalty matters more, with an Odor Removal Tower at the discharge where a riser is permitted but the nearest residential window is close enough to be a complaint risk. Where the building does allow a full route, a ducted electrostatic precipitator with a centrifugal fan and a carbon stage is the arrangement that keeps the fire-rated riser cleaner and the roof plant smaller.
It is worth comparing the two architectures on the number that Polish projects always underestimate: a ductless hood system removes the riser, the façade penetration and most of the wspólnota negotiation, at the cost of carrying the whole odour duty in media. A ducted purification line keeps the media smaller and the running cost lower, at the cost of a fire-rated shaft and a roof fan the building has to accept. And for operators trading from a trailer at festivals and markets rather than a fixed tenement unit, the mobile catering carts carry their own compliance with the vehicle, which settles the shaft question by removing the building from the equation.
10. Ten lines for the Polish quotation
| No. | Item | What a checkable answer contains |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Extract airflow | m³/h, with the air-change check and the face-velocity check both shown |
| 2 | Canopy geometry | Overhang in mm beyond the cooking line, side skirts, opening area used in the calculation |
| 3 | Make-up air | Volume at 80 to 90 percent of extract, delivery location, tempering capacity in kW at a stated design outdoor temperature |
| 4 | Shaft route | Drawing showing whether the riser is dedicated or shared, its fire rating, and the non-return arrangement per tenant |
| 5 | Duct fire rating | EI class, cladding or purpose-made duct, penetration sealing detail and who certifies it |
| 6 | Odour stage | Media mass in kilograms and contact time in seconds, derived from the design airflow |
| 7 | Cleaning | Interval in months for the stated trading hours, access door positions, report format with photographs |
| 8 | Noise | Sound power by octave band, predicted level at the nearest residential window, silencer position |
| 9 | Consents | Who obtains wspólnota resolution, conservation consent and building notification, listed as line items with dates |
| 10 | Spares and media | Carbon change interval, filter and cell part numbers, plant weight for structural review |
A Polish quotation that answers items 3, 4 and 9 is usually a quotation from someone who has fitted a tenement before. Those are the three lines that decide whether the restaurant opens in spring or in autumn.
11. The short version
In a Polish tenement the building, not the menu, sets the specification. The residential riser is off limits, a commercial shaft is possible but needs fire rating, backdraught dampers, metering, cleaning access and an honest look at how a kebab counter and a coffee shop share the same air. Airflow is the larger of the air-change figure and the capture figure — typically 4,000 m³/h for a four-burner line — and 80 percent make-up at minus 20 °C costs about 43 kW of heat that nobody puts in the first budget. Get the shaft drawing, the fire rating and the wspólnota resolution before the lease, and the rest is arithmetic that fits on one page.
