As a busy restaurant owner, you have to deal with a lot of grease and sludge regularly. The Public Health Act makes it illegal for restaurant owners to drain out restaurant grease and oil into public sewers. Your license might get discharged if you can’t show compliance.
That’s why restaurant owners often have contracts with a reputable grease trap cleaning service. Apart from complying with regulations, you need to regularly clean your grease trap for a few other reasons. Keeping it clean helps to:
- Prevent foul smell
- Protect your staff from health risks
- Avoid clogged drains
- Save high costs on repair
Now that you know the importance of keeping your grease trap clean, let’s figure out the symptoms of a dirty interceptor:
1. Horrible Smell
Restaurants are establishments that are designed to smell nice and titillate your senses to make you order their delicious food. The best restaurants are full of strong aromas of all sorts of ingredients. Garlic and onions are some of the strong flavours you get used to in a kitchen. However, a horrible rotting stench is completely out of expectations. It may get your establishment in trouble with the authorities.
Your grease trap catches food waste, used cooking oils, solid waste and most other types of organic filth generated in the kitchen. It contains the perfect recipe for disease-causing microbes to breed and multiply. That’s why it’s essential to hire the services of a grease trap maintenance and get it cleaned every few months. Otherwise, all that organic waste will rot and spread a nasty stench.
2. Slow Drains
Over time, grease and oil collected in the grease trap solidify into a very dense sludge. Every day, the sludge slowly reaches the density of a solid. That restricts the flow of wastewater into the sewer system. When you throw out the leftover soup into the drain, you’ll notice that it moves slowly and takes more time to flush out completely.
If the flow of kitchen waste has slowed down significantly, your drains may be completely clogged. In such cases, it is important to search for “grease trap removal near me” and hire the services of a trusted cleaning company. Greaseco is one such company that provides excellent grease cleaning and removal services in Ireland.
It’s important to be quick with decisions when you have a clogged drain. A clogged drain accumulates pressure and that may have drastic effects on your entire plumbing system. You don’t want to delay the problem long enough to flood the kitchen and regret it later on.
3. Bathroom Problems
Apart from slowing down your drains, fat particles may slow down the overall pressure in your plumbing system. That means your customers would also notice the problem when they use the bathroom and press down on the flush lever.
4. Grease Leaks
Oil and animal fats are lighter than water and that’s the principle grease traps use to separate them and trap the substances. As wastewater from the kitchen enters the trap it is slowed down drastically and the FOG particles float on the top while solid waste settles down at the bottom. However, the interceptor has limited space to catch the grease.
When the trap has 25 per cent of the volume filled with solids and grease, some of it tries to slip through into plumbing. When that happens, you’ll find grease in the most random places in your restaurant. Grease and oil make their way to different places in your restaurant via sinks and pipes. In the worst cases, you’ll find the sink and drain leaking fat particles. That’s when the grease trap is alarmingly full and dirty and needs the services of professionals.
5. Cleaning is Overdue
Time is also a great indicator. Think of the last time you got the grease trap cleaned. You may have a very dirty interceptor if you can’t remember the last time, you got it cleaned. The same holds if it’s been several months since you got the trap cleaned.
So, how long is too long?
It depends on several factors like the number of customers you get every day and the kind of food you sell. Ideally, you should get your restaurant grease trap cleaned every 30 to 90 days.
As a restaurant owner, it’s best not to wait for the symptoms of a dirty equipment. Symptoms usually occur when you ignore a problem for too long. You may lose more money on repairs if you skimp on grease trap cleaning costs. More severe consequences include losing your restaurant license and customers. Instead, it’s better to hire the services of professionals for routine cleanups.
