Are you having problems with overflowing sink, clogged sewer system or stinking odor coming from your toilets? Your grease traps need cleaning!
Grease traps are also known as grease interceptors or grease recovery devices installed in drainage hole of your kitchen sink. Grease traps are plumbing components used to catch solids and particularly grease prior to entry into a waste water disposal unit. Oil contained in waste water and those from food production in kitchens and restaurants can cause the septic tank or the treatment apparatus to discharge untreated sewage to the surrounding environment. This unwanted release of untreated waste can be reduced or avoided with the use of grease traps while preventing blockages in drain pipes due to the mixture of highly viscous fats and cooking grease that solidify when cooled.
Here’s a video on what a grease trap is and how it works.
Not having grease traps in kitchen sinks can cause not only sewer pipe blockages . It can also lead to sewer overflows including municipal sewer overflows. These blockages and overflows due to untrapped grease can affect waste water utility operations and may also increase operations and maintenance requirements for sewer system or of local waste water collection system.
Kinds of Grease Traps
The most common grease trap is a small passive grease trap which can be used below three compartment sinks within the kitchen.
A passive grease trap 25 percent full should already be emptied since this kind of grease trap is already less effective when filled with grease at a quarter or more of its capacity.
On the other hand, a liner grease trap provides more benefits to users than the passive trap in terms of hygiene, safety and health. The liner grease trap is also more efficient since it can filter about 85 to 90 percent of approaching fats, oil and greases. The collected and rooting brown grease inside a grease trap must be removed regularly or at a certain schedule. It must be released into a landfill instead of being recycled because they are hazardous waste. It is said that each restaurant can accumulate about 300 to 400 pounds of brown grease annually which are sent into a landfill.
A third kind of grease strap is a grease recovery device which can remove the grease automatically when trapped. The recovered yellow grease is recycled together with the waste vegetable oil from deep fryers of kitchen, eliminating pumping costs.