Grease Traps

Grease interceptors (also called grease traps) are required for restaurants and most facilities handling food. Given that, proper installation and maintenance are critical for smooth operations. Renowned Plumbing provides affordable grease trap services to all Southern California areas. Schedule an appointment today.

Grease traps are important to keep functioning, especially if you run a restaurant or a business that requires heavy use of the kitchen. A grease trap will contain fats and vegetable oils in kitchen wastewater that flow through your plumbing system before they reach sanitary sewer lines. If grease is allowed to build up too heavily, your lines will become clogged and backed up – not a pretty sight or smell! Backups of having strong smells do to grease built up are certainly not good for business since your kitchen cannot function without properly flowing lines. A clog in your commercial kitchen could be extremely detrimental to your business and your professional reputation.

Clogs can be messy, smelly, and time-consuming. Our team knows what to do. We can get your kitchen up and running in no time Call our commercial grease specialists today and ask about our grease trap services, our licensed commercial plumbing experts at Renowned are ready to help day or night.

Why?

FOG — fats, oils, and grease — place a major burden on sewage treatment plants. And they can cause big problems if you’re on a septic tank. They can also clog even huge sewer lines a foot or more in diameter. You may have seen some photos gross-looking of “fatbergs” on the web. These monsters disrupt dozens, hundreds, even thousands of businesses and homes until they’re cleared.

So your grease trap is an important part of your city and county inspections, with penalties often running well into the thousands of dollars per violation.

How?

Fats, oils, and grease weigh something like 1/4 that of water, so they float to the top. A grease trap is a large tank with baffles to slow down the flow enough for FOG to rise to the top and sludge to sink to the bottom. Water exits through the middle.

Did You Know? Los Angeles has a total of over 6,000 miles of sewer lines.

We’re your local experts for grease trap installation — new, replacement, and upgrades — as well as for all your commercial drain and sewer needs.

Grease Trap Installation

To avoid backups, too-frequent pump-outs, and rancid odors (not to mention health code violations) you need the right type and size of trap properly installed. And that involves a lot more than just hooking up an inlet, outlet, and vent. So whether you need a new installation, are replacing a damaged unit, or need to upgrade to something bigger and better let our grease trap services experts take care of it.

How Big?

Grease interceptor sizing is based on a gpm flow rate (gallons per minute) that in turn determines the trap size in gallons. Here are a couple of rules of thumb to estimate the gpm rating needed for a grease trap. You’ll then have some idea of what models and sizes can handle that flow based on their product literature.

• Multiple the length, width, and depth of a sink in inches. Multiplying these three numbers together gives you cubic inches. Divide that by 230 to get a gpm flow rate. For multiple sinks add together 100% of the largest, 50% of the smallest, and 25% of all the others.
• For restaurants multiplying the number of seats by 1 to 2 gallons per seat times, the number of hours of operation gives a rough estimate.

It’s not unusual for restaurants to have a gpm flow total that results in an interceptor as large as 1,000 gallons.

These estimates may not meet city or county requirements. Our plumber has a detailed understanding of relevant local plumbing codes.

Notes: For spray hoods base the gpm on that of the hood. Don’t connect dishwashers and garbage disposals into a line with a grease interceptor — they will overwhelm the trap with food debris.

Where?

Traps as large as 50 gallons are often installed indoors, right by or underneath a sink. Easy access makes installation a lot easier and less expensive, but these smaller units require more frequent maintenance and may be more expensive in the long run. Big models above 500 gallons or so are the ones usually referred to as interceptors. Their operation is the same, but their huge size means excavation, specialized plumbing, and paving. You’ll want an experienced plumbing contractor such as Renowned to coordinate these efforts and make sure everything’s exactly right before being covered.