A kitchen is among the busiest and most important areas, whether at home or in your restaurant. It is where the magic happens. Any food eaten in your home or restaurant comes from a kitchen. The busier your kitchen is, the more time and effort are required to keep it operational and clean. Today, grease traps are a critical part of any commercial kitchen. Besides easing the dishwashing process, the traps ensure your drains work well. For this reason, you must ensure that you hire a plumber to pump your grease traps during maintenance. As you will find below, not doing so could result in several unpleasant outcomes.
Reasons to Ensure Your Grease Traps Are Maintained Properly
Since some business owners and homeowners don’t understand the critical role that grease traps play in their drainage system, they can take these plumbing elements for granted easily. However, a grease trap is essential for the safety and health of the commercial kitchen. Are you among such business owners? Can you recall when you had a plumber clean the grease traps? If true, then you could soon experience the following issues:
Clogging
Whenever you neglect the grease traps, the first and most apparent issue you must contend with is clogged drains. This is because the buildup of dust, dirt, debris, waste foods, grease, and other materials will accumulate and fill the trap, thickening and preventing wastewater flow. You cannot operate your restaurant kitchen with clogged drains. Besides being a nasty inconvenience, clogs can bring the operations within your commercial kitchen to a grinding halt. The result is a loss of revenue when you have to close the business to rectify the issue. Hence, a reliable plumber regularly checks and cleans the drains and grease traps.
Safety and Health Risks
With clogged grease traps come several safety and health risks to the customers and your restaurant staff. For instance, choosing to continue kitchen operations with clogged or dirty drain pipes means the utensils and foods might get contaminated. Some bacteria live in the drains; if they find their way into your kitchen through backflow, that is a sanitation nightmare. Your esteemed clients and staff might contract hygiene-related illnesses, which isn’t great for the business.
Building a great reputation for your business might have taken years, but ruining it could take only minutes, and lack of hygiene can be the reason behind it. If the local authorities determine that your kitchen is the cause of hygiene-related issues, they could order a shutdown. Serving contaminated food could see you sued and lose a huge percentage of your clients. Thus, the only sure way to protect your brand, clients, and staff is to ensure a plumber cleans the trap whenever it reaches 25%.
Awful Odors
The other effect of failure to have a plumber service or maintain your grease traps could result in pungent and awful smells. A buildup and decomposition of waste products, dirty water, grease, oils, and food particles cause these. These odors can sometimes be unpleasant, unbearable, and a sign of poor hygiene. Besides creating an undesirable place of work for your staff, it also scares away your clients. Such odors can result in stomach complications, among other mild health issues. The bad smells also attract the attention of your local area health inspectors. They won’t hesitate to shut down your restaurant for safety and health reasons. Hence, ensure that you regularly maintain those grease traps.
Wastewater Backup
Grease traps are usually installed in the drainage part of your plumbing. Hence, if they are half full, they can significantly affect the flow of waste in the drains. For this reason, it is recommended that you enlist a plumber to clean them when you notice they are at 25% full. When the trap becomes full and materials thicken, they prevent the wastewater flow. Since this water doesn’t have a place to go, it starts flowing back into your commercial kitchen via the sinks and drains. This is the worst hygiene issue. The wastewater carries germs that carry diseases and smells awful, not forgetting that it could dirty your kitchen. In this case, you’ll have to shut your business and contact an emergency plumber to address the issue. Unfortunately, this will cost you lots of cash.
Costly Consequences
Grease traps can result in many issues for you and your restaurant. Dealing with clogged grease traps and their consequences is more expensive than maintaining them. For instance, when the traps are clogged, you will pay the plumber more to unclog them. You may have to close your business for several days, losing revenue. The grease accumulation can damage the plumbing system or drains, so you’ll have to hire an inspector to check your water and food for contamination. And if this isn’t bad enough, you could lose your clients and see your brand ruined because of the bad customer experiences and unhealthy foods.
Preventing Grease Trap Clogging
Preventative maintenance and effective cleaning methods from a reliable plumber are the surest way to prevent these grease trap issues. With innovations today, you can rely on hydro jetting as a drain cleaning option that will scrape even the smallest food particles and bits of grease sticking along the drains. Experts recommend cleaning your grease traps regularly when they are about 25% full. However, the speed at which your grease traps fill relies on how busy your restaurant is. If your joint has busy operations, you might have to pump the grease traps more frequently.
The only way to avoid these issues is to ensure your grease trap stays under 25% full. You should have a professional maintain it. Though this might seem like lots of work, it will be worth your effort and time in the long run. Do you need a grease trap pumping service? Contact us at MainLine Plumbing for a reliable, professional service.
See our previous blog on this topic here.