It isn’t uncommon for a restaurant owner or manager to have missed this not-so-intriguing lesson in their Restaurant Plumbing 101 course at culinary school, but it is an important lesson to cover, so let’s review.
What is a grease trap?
Let’s start with the basics. A restaurant grease trap or interceptor is one of those safety items that makes the world a better place but, if not maintained, can literally backfire on your restaurant, causing a lot of damage to your plumbing, your kitchen, your restaurant, your customer confidence and ultimately, your bottom line.
All cities have codes requiring restaurant grease traps in order for restaurants to be in compliance or risk being shut down. And there’s a good reason for this. Restaurants generate a lot of grease and when that grease is released into a municipalities drains or sewer systems, havoc ensues.
Grease and food solids do the same things to a town’s sewer systems that they do to human arteries: it clogs them and eventually will cause major problems for the entire system. Early on, towns realized that by requiring restaurants to install and maintain grease traps, the problem of clogged sewer systems could be avoided.
The grease interceptor mechanism or grease trap works by creating a barrier that utilizes the simple physics of grease, water and gravity to trap grease and oil as well as food matter and contain it on the restaurant property before it reaches the sewer.
So long as the trap is not full, everything drains as it should, but once the grease trap is full, it ceases to allow water to reach the sewer lateral that heads to the city sewer and a flow rate needed to transport it from the restaurant.
Translation: once it’s full your drain water or water from sinks has no where to go but back into your restaurant. This way the problem is owned by the restaurant owner and not the municipality at large.
There Are Two Ways To Remember To Clean Your Grease Trap.
The first way to remember to clean whichever types of grease traps you use is to schedule a service with a company who offers restaurant grease trap cleaning near me. The second way is to wait for your grease trap to send you an untimely and unwelcome reminder on its own.
In the first scenario you simply pick up the phone and call Millstadt Rendering, conveniently located in Millstadt, Illinois. We’re a company who offers restaurant grease trap services. We have decades of keeping grease traps clean and functioning correctly. And one of the best parts of scheduling a service with us is that we will schedule your trap cleaning and tend to the necessary pumping and maintenance on a regular schedule so that you never have to worry about whether or not your system is working properly.
The second scenario – the one in which your grease trap communicates it’s fullness with you directly – is not so pretty. It works like this:
Your restaurant or commercial kitchen trap reaches full capacity, it responds by clogging your drainage system, severely reducing the amount of water that can pass through it. This somehow never fails to happen on your busiest shift of the week.
You can’t mistake the signals that it is sending to you because you and your guests will immediately be alerted to the smell of sewage coming from your disabled plumbing system. Your sewer lines are now nearly useless to handle the flow of water and food waste.
Things quickly escalate, usually at at time of the night when plumber visits are prohibitively expensive.
The Easy Answer For Grease Trap Maintenance
It’s important to have a grease trap company you can count on. Call Millstadt Rendering now, at: 618-538-5312 or fill out the form on this page to schedule a service. We’ll keep your trap clear and your business on track.