Five Dangers of a Clogged Grease Trap

The best way to keep a grease trap working well is to keep up with periodic maintenance. When it’s clear, your plumbing works better and your restaurant kitchen remains sanitary. If you fail to clear it and it eventually becomes clogged, you will face impacts that affect the safety of your kitchen. Here are five clogged grease trap dangers to avoid in your New Orleans, LA kitchen:

• Plumbing problems: The grease trap keeps grease out of your plumbing, but it will fail to do so if you do not pump it out occasionally. Schedule this maintenance on a regular basis or materials will build up and you’ll face plumbing problems, including overflows and slow drainage. Eventually, it will damage your plumbing, which makes maintaining sanitary conditions difficult.
• Contamination: Clogged grease traps cause two types of contamination: fumes and water. Dirty grease traps are hazards to employees who have to inhale the fumes from them all day long. If it continues to go ignored, wastewater can overflow and contaminate your water source. This gets scary as you imagine sharing that water with customers through drinking and cooking. Unless you desire Yelp reviews in which customers track gastrointestinal distress to your restaurant, you will keep these grease traps clean.
• Odors: The problem with contaminating fumes is that your customers will pick up on them too. Rather than stay in the restaurant like your employees are forced to do, they will detect the smells and leave. They may even mention the odor on their Yelp reviews and, once again, you’ll find yourself having to defend your restaurant’s sanitary practices. Possible workers’ compensation claims are bad enough when employees report illness from fumes, but you do not need the bad publicity either.
• Fires: Grease is highly flammable. When the grease trap fills up, you make a fire more likely to start and spread when it does ignite. Even with alert employees and fire extinguishers close at hand, the fire can spread quickly and cause extensive damage and injury. In serious cases, you may even need to close down for repairs. A clean grease trap removes one element of fire fuel and will pay off in the long run by keeping your kitchen safer.
• Expense: Fire damage and plumbing repairs can already threaten your fragile restaurant budget. Add closures as you deal with damage and your profit potential drops even further. Another expense includes health department fines, especially if an employee or customer becomes ill and reports you. The health department will require that your restaurant close until you can be in compliance. As you can likely see, this is a losing venture all around, and it’s better to put that money into a clean grease trap.

Safeway Used Oil and Grease is here to help you avoid clogged grease trap dangers in the greater New Orleans, LA area. We can clean your grease trap as well as take any used cooking oil away for recycling so you don’t have to deal with it anymore. Call us today if your restaurant needs grease trap cleaning or other services.

Categorised in: Grease Trap Cleaning