Restaurant Make-Up Air System

The kitchen's exhaust hoods were pulling more air out of the building than anything was putting back in, creating negative pressure that made doors slam shut and left staff sweating over the line even in winter, while the dining room up front felt drafty as it fought to backfill the missing air. An airflow analysis confirmed the imbalance, so we installed a packaged make-up air unit with demand-control ventilation to replace exactly what the hoods remove, then rebalanced the exhaust to match across every station. We tuned the controls to ramp make-up air up and down with actual cooking load instead of running at a fixed rate, keeping energy costs in check during slower parts of the day. The kitchen now holds a comfortable, stable pressure through every dinner rush, and the entire fix was designed, installed, and commissioned without shutting the restaurant down for a single service.