A commercial kitchen is an industrial electrical and gas load sitting inside a building envelope that was almost certainly serviced for a retail tenant. That mismatch is the single most expensive thing to discover after a lease is signed, and it is discovered after a lease is signed most of the time.
The good news is that it is checkable in an afternoon, before you commit. This guide is what to check and what the numbers mean.
Why the existing service is usually wrong
A 2,000 sq ft unit built for general retail has an electrical service sized for lighting, receptacles, a point-of-sale system and a rooftop heating and cooling unit. Its gas service, if it has one, was sized for that rooftop furnace.
A kitchen in the same envelope adds refrigeration that runs continuously, a ventilation system that both exhausts and heats replacement air, water heating at a volume no retail tenant needs, and a cooking line. Each of those is larger than everything the original service was designed for.
So the question is never “is there power and gas.” It is “how much, at what voltage, in how many phases, and what will the utility let me add.”
What a kitchen draws electrically
The real number comes from a load calculation done by an electrical engineer against your actual equipment schedule, with the demand factors the Ontario Electrical Safety Code allows. It is not the sum of the nameplates, and anyone who quotes you the sum of the nameplates is going to oversize your service.
But as a planning frame, and to tell you whether a unit is in the right order of magnitude at all:
- A café or bakery with gas or no cooking — espresso, refrigeration, a small oven, a dish machine — often works on 200 amps, single-phase, 240 volts. Sometimes less.
- A quick-service or full-service restaurant with a gas cooking line typically lands in the 400 to 600 amp range, usually three-phase.
- An electric-forward kitchen — combi ovens, induction, electric fryers, rotisserie, conveyor ovens — moves quickly to 600 to 800 amps and beyond, and is three-phase by necessity rather than choice.
The gap between the first and third of those is the whole point. Two operators can look at the same unit, and one of them has a straightforward fit-out while the other has a utility project.
Three-phase is a yes-or-no question, and the answer changes the menu
Most heavier commercial equipment is available in three-phase and much of it is available in nothing else. Three-phase motors are smaller, cheaper and more efficient for the same work, so manufacturers build to it.
You cannot run three-phase equipment from a single-phase service. A rotary phase converter exists, takes space, costs money, wastes energy and is a workaround rather than a solution. And you cannot swap a piece of equipment’s phase after the fact — it is a different machine.
So: find out whether the unit has three-phase power before you sign anything. If it does not, and the building does not, bringing it in means the utility, and that is measured in months.
Voltage matters as much as amperage
In Ontario commercial buildings the common service is 208Y/120 volts, three-phase — which gives you 120 V for receptacles and 208 V for equipment. Larger and industrial buildings are frequently 600 volts, three-phase, which no kitchen equipment runs on directly; it needs a step-down transformer, which is real equipment needing real space and a real budget line.
Equipment is ordered to a voltage. A 208 V machine delivered to a 240 V single-phase service, or vice versa, is a re-order and a lead time, not a rewire. Get the voltage and phase onto the equipment schedule before anything is ordered.
Where the amps actually go
Operators tend to assume the cooking line is the load. Often it is not, particularly in a gas kitchen. The things that quietly consume a service:
Booster heater for a high-temperature dish machine. A booster takes building hot water at roughly 60 °C and raises it to the 82 °C the final rinse needs. That is commonly a 12 to 15 kW electrical load, and in a café it can be larger than everything else in the kitchen combined. It is also the load most often left off an early schedule, because a dish machine gets listed as one line item.
Refrigeration condensing units. They run continuously, and unlike a fryer they never have an off period that a demand factor can lean on.
Make-up air and HVAC. If your make-up air unit is electrically heated rather than gas-fired, it is one of the largest loads in the building. This is a decision made on the mechanical drawings, and it swings the electrical service.
Electric cooking equipment. A single combi oven can be a 20 kW three-phase load. Induction is efficient in use and heavy in connected load.
Everything ordinary. Lighting, receptacles, POS, signage, hand dryers, a compressor for the beverage system. Individually small, collectively a panel’s worth.
Gas: the BTU number nobody adds up
Gas capacity is simpler to understand and just as often the binding constraint. Every gas appliance has a nameplate input in BTU per hour, and the service, meter, regulator and pipe into your unit have to carry the total with adequate pressure at the furthest appliance.
Typical nameplate inputs, for scale only — use the actual spec sheet for the actual model:
- Six-burner range with a standard oven — roughly 200,000 BTU/h
- Deep fryer — roughly 90,000 to 120,000 BTU/h each
- Griddle — roughly 20,000 to 30,000 BTU/h per foot
- Charbroiler — roughly 40,000 BTU/h per foot
- Convection oven — roughly 60,000 to 80,000 BTU/h
- Commercial water heater — roughly 100,000 to 200,000 BTU/h
- Gas-fired tempered make-up air unit — 400,000 BTU/h and up
Add a modest cooking line, a water heater and a make-up air unit and you are past 1,000,000 BTU/h without anything exotic on the line. The rooftop furnace your unit was serviced for was likely 100,000 to 200,000.
This is why “there is gas to the unit” tells you almost nothing. What matters is the meter’s capacity, the size of the line into the unit, the pressure available, and whether the distribution main in the street has room.
Who is involved on the gas side
Enbridge Gas is the distributor for effectively all of Ontario. Meter and service upgrades are their work, on their schedule and their application process — not something your contractor can accelerate.
Inside the building, gas work is done by a fitter with the appropriate certificate, under the Technical Standards and Safety Authority (TSSA) and the CSA B149.1 natural gas and propane installation code. The gas piping is inspected, and the appliances are commissioned against it.
Who has to be involved, and when
On the electrical side there are three separate parties and they are frequently confused for one another:
Your electrical contractor does the work and files a notification of work with the Electrical Safety Authority (ESA) — required for essentially all electrical work in Ontario, filed before the work starts or within 48 hours of starting. ESA then inspects.
The ESA is the inspection authority. They do not do the work and they do not own the service.
Your local distribution company owns the service to the building — Toronto Hydro, Alectra Utilities, Hydro One, London Hydro and others, depending on the city. If the service itself has to change, this is their project. Where a service upgrade means disconnecting, the utility de-energises, the new work is inspected, and only then is power restored.
The thing to take from that list: three of the parties who control your energisation date do not work for you. They have queues, application windows, drawing-review cycles and their own construction schedules. A contractor can compress a framing schedule. Nobody compresses a utility.
This is why capacity is a lease-stage question. Discovering at week six of construction that you need a new service is not a delay measured against your build schedule — it is a delay measured against a utility’s.
What to check before you sign
None of this requires an engineer. It requires twenty minutes and a phone camera.
Open the electrical panel door and photograph the label. You want the main breaker rating in amps, the voltage, and whether it says 1Ø or 3Ø (single or three phase). Count the spare breaker spaces while you are there.
Find out whether the service is dedicated or shared. In a multi-tenant building your unit may have an allocation from a larger building service rather than its own. An allocation is a contractual number, and it can be smaller than the panel suggests.
Ask where the meter room is and whether there is a route from it to your unit for new conduit. A path that does not exist is a demolition line item.
Find the gas meter. Photograph its label. Note the size of the pipe coming into the unit, and whether there is a shutoff inside your premises.
Ask the landlord, in writing, what service the unit is entitled to — not what is installed today. Entitlement and installation are different numbers, and the difference is who pays.
Ask what the previous tenant did. A unit that was a nail salon and a unit that was a restaurant are different propositions even if they look identical. A former food premises may have capacity, a gas line, a grease interceptor and a roof path already in place, which is most of the argument for a second-generation space.
If the answers do not add up, that is information worth having before you are committed to five years of rent. See choosing a space for a food business for the rest of that checklist, and second-generation versus cold shell space for what the difference is actually worth.
How this interacts with the rest of the build
Utility capacity is not an isolated trade. It is downstream of decisions you make early and upstream of everything that gets ordered.
Your menu sets your cooking line. Your cooking line sets your hood type, and the hood sets your exhaust and make-up air volumes — which are themselves substantial electrical or gas loads. See commercial kitchen ventilation, explained for that chain.
Your warewashing choice sets whether you need a booster heater and how much hot water you have to make. See the dish area.
Your refrigeration layout decides whether condensing units sit inside the building drawing power and making heat, or on the roof. See sizing and specifying a walk-in.
All of which is to say: the electrical and mechanical design cannot be finished until the equipment schedule is finished, and the equipment cannot be ordered until the electrical and mechanical design says what voltage and phase to order. That loop is closed once, deliberately, at drawing stage — and it is the reason specifying equipment before you price it is the order that actually works.
The short version
- The unit’s existing service was sized for a retail tenant. Assume it is not enough until you have checked.
- Three-phase power and gas capacity are yes-or-no lease questions. Ask them before you sign.
- The largest loads are often not the cooking line — booster heaters, make-up air and refrigeration are where the capacity goes.
- Get voltage and phase onto the equipment schedule before anything is ordered.
- The utility and the gas distributor set their own schedule. That schedule is the reason this is a lease-stage question.
For a planning range on a fit-out including mechanical and electrical scope, use the cost calculator. For a specific space, the answer comes from reading the panel and the meter — which is usually the first thing we do on a site visit.
