What does an insurer ask for after a kitchen fire?

A kitchen fire claim turns on maintenance. Not on whether you were careless on the night, which is what people expect, but on whether the equipment was serviced on the schedule the policy assumes. That is a documentation question, and it is answered from records that existed before the fire.

What gets asked for

1. Hood and duct cleaning history. Certificates, with dates, usually going back two years or more. Grease accumulation is the single most common cause of these fires and the most common exclusion argument.
2. Suppression system service reports. Semiannual inspection records, and whether the system discharged as designed. If it did not, the question immediately becomes why.
3. Extinguisher service tags and any equipment service history for whatever was involved: the fryer, the range, the ansul nozzles, the filters.

Why the dates matter more than the documents

An adjuster is establishing a timeline. If the hood was cleaned quarterly for three years and the fire happened eleven weeks after the last cleaning, that is a maintained system with an ordinary interval. If the last certificate is from fourteen months ago, the conversation changes, whatever the actual cause turns out to be.

This is also why a certificate with no date, or a vendor invoice that says "hood service" with no scope, is worth so much less than it looks. It proves somebody was paid. It does not prove when the system was last clean.

The reconstruction problem

After a fire, the obvious move is to call your vendors and ask them to send copies of everything. Sometimes that works. Frequently it does not: the company changed hands, the technician who did the work left, the records were on a laptop, or they can produce an invoice but not the certificate. You are then reconstructing a two year history from your own bank statements, at the worst possible time, to a party deciding whether to pay you.

The asymmetry is the whole point. Collecting these records costs nothing while nothing has happened. Reconstructing them costs you the claim.

One thing worth doing today

Whatever system you keep records in, check that you can currently produce, in under five minutes: the last two hood cleaning certificates, the last two suppression reports, and your current extinguisher service tags. If you cannot, that is the gap, and it is much cheaper to close now than to explain later.