Oil, grease, and other fats might make your food taste delicious, but they can gum up the works in your plumbing and lead to foul odors. Luckily, grease traps help to prevent this! They allow water to pass through the drain as usual while keeping the grease and sludge separate. In order to keep doing its job properly, a grease trap needs to be cleaned regularly, at least every three months or so and more often if necessary. Here’s how to do it!
Locate the Grease Trap
Your grease trap is probably under your sink in a metal box, or it might be under a metal plate in the floor or even outside the building in a commercial kitchen. Take the lid off slowly so that you don’t damage the gaskets or make a mess with the grease inside.
Empty the Contents
It may help you to take a picture of the grease trip before you start disassembling it, so that you can remember where everything goes when it’s time to put it back together. Then, it’s time to scoop the grease out of the trap and into another receptacle like a bucket. A scraper can help with this. If you and your restaurant are required to make a FOG report to the EPA, make sure you note how much waste has been collected by the trap!
Wash the Trap
Scrub all of the components of the grease trap with soapy water. A piece of steel wool or some other type of pot scrubber can help you with this process. Make sure you flush the screens and parts well with water to remove all of the grease as well as any traces of soap.
Reassemble the Trap
Relying on the picture you took as needed, put the trap back together and reinstall it under your sink. Then, dispose of the waste you cleaned out properly in the trash and your grease trap should be good to go for another few months.
If you think this sounds like a daunting task, we don’t blame you! Keeping your grease trap clean and functional is very important, so rather than putting off this job, call in the experts to help you. At The Plumbing Works in Lancaster, PA, we offer a wide variety of plumbing maintenance services. Contact us today to discuss what we can do for you!
