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How Often Should You Clean Your Grease Traps?

How often one must clean grease traps depends on how it is being used. Calling an expert to do it may be costly. This is the reason why many people often decide to just do it by themselves. If you are running a commercial establishment such as a restaurant, how clean it is determines whether you move your business to the next level or not. As a basic rule of thumb, all food places should be thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom. There’s no way around that. And if you miss out on cleaning your place, you could end up in trouble with the local authorities.  

Cleaning grease traps may be a problem because the contraptions are always out of sight and that the stench that comes out of it may not be pleasing.  However, having grease traps in an eatery is important since they play a role in preventing oils and grease from entering the drainage system. Any single trap will retain about 50- 90 % of any fog that gets into the trap. If the traps are not cleaned often, it can compromise your workplace and become a health hazard to your patrons. When you leave your traps full of grease, fat and oil, it welcomes unwanted guests such as cockroaches, flies and rodents.

Cleaning your traps often is therefore mandatory if you want to make sure you don’t get these pests in your establishment. Other than becoming a source of food for pests, grease traps loaded with fats have an unpleasant odor. Too much of this and you can be sure that your patrons are going to choose another place to dine in. Lastly, allowing a lot of oil and fats to accumulate in your traps will make them even more difficult to clean and could render your traps useless.

Grease trap manufacturers recommend that the traps should be cleaned by scraping and removing all the grease at least once per day. However, this is not feasible hence most municipalities recommend that grease traps be cleaned once per month.

Ideally, the grease traps needs to be cleaned as soon as you notice that the grease level has reached 25% of the traps volume. Any grease fraction exceeding 25 % means that you run a risk of having grease overflow into the drain pipes.  If more grease flows into the trap, it will force your traps to backup.  Calling for an emergency drain cleaning is not just expensive but will disrupt your services and lead to a loss of revenue. It may also lead to dissatisfied customers.

As a result, it is recommended that you clean your traps as often as you can afford. Make it a part of the daily cleaning routine and you shouldn’t have any issues in the near future. If you end up needing plumbing assistance, Plumbers 911 located in both Fresno and Modesto are happy to help. For more information, go to their website, and for fun tips and informational articles, visit their Facebook pages: Plumbers 911 Fresno, Plumbers 911 Modesto, and their main page Plumbers 911.