Grease traps are often a major hassle for restaurants and commercial kitchens, but their regular cleaning and maintenance results in a much better experience with them. Grease trap cleaning is very important, as it keeps the grease traps functional, keeping fats, oils or grease (FOG) from entering the public sewer system, and also keeps your pipes flowing and prevents backups or noxious gases from leaking out.
Stopping Those Nasty Clogs
Grease traps, in general, help keep your business’s pipes flowing, but also helps the public sewers by preventing FOG from entering the system and clogging it up. When you pour FOGs down the drain, they will cool down and solidify, resulting in a mass growing on the inside of your pipes until it fully blocks the pipe. If these FOG make it to your municipal sewers, this can cause a blockage that affects entire city blocks and results in you being fined heavily to pay for the cleanup. This is why grease trap cleaning is very important. Depending on the size of your business, traps, and laws in your area, you may need to clean your traps at least once a month to keep everything flowing properly.
Cleaning Your Grease Traps
Ideally, when you need a grease trap cleaning, you should consider using a professional cleaning company like Drane Ranger. While you can do the job yourself, you need to ensure you have all the necessary equipment, such as respirators, rubber gloves, coveralls, scraper, wrench, bucket & scoop, and a shop vacuum to suck everything out. Doing it yourself is going to be very unpleasant, and while you can clean out most of the FOGs and such from your grease trap, you likely do not have the equipment and expertise to deal with the intake and outtake outlets properly, or the capability to do maintenance checks on all the parts of the system to ensure that nothing needs to be repaired or replaced.
Safety is a Concern with Grease Traps
If you don’t perform regular grease trap cleaning, or do the bare minimum required, you may be risking your staff or customer safety. While grease traps gather FOG, they also gather up food particles that make their way down your sinks. These food particles over time are going to break down and start letting off noxious sulfur fumes, which not only smell bad but can be a health hazard.
What Not To Do With Grease Traps
Many may think of doing something to try to delay the next time they need a grease trap cleaning, but some of these things can be harmful to your grease trap, pipes, and sewers. Do not pour boiling water into the trap; this will liquefy any FOG and send it into the sewers to solidify again, causing a very expensive backup in the future. Do not put chemicals, bleach, additives, or drain cleaners into a trap. These will destroy the bacteria that is in the trap breaking down the FOG, and risks environmental damage. Do not add extra biological agents, enzymes or bugs to the system, as these may emulsify the grease and allow it to pass straight into the municipal sewer.
Hire a Professional Cleaner for Your Grease Trap Cleaning
To ensure you get a proper clean, and proper maintenance and repairs to your grease trap system, contact the professionals at Drane Ranger today to book an appointment for cleaning your grease traps.