Cafes are becoming a trend in Malaysia, each offering a wide variety of food and beverages while all of them differ in aesthetics and some in specialty coffee. Some cafes have a larger crowd due to the design of the interior and exterior of the café and some have more exclusive food and better-tasting desserts. But behind the calm and peaceful atmosphere in a café, is a war. A war where chefs rush to prepare food, baristas urgently send drinks out, waiters run back and forth, and where dishwashers have no end to cleaning plates full of sauce.
Unfinished plates of food will be sent to the kitchen where food is discarded and plates full of sauce are washed. Have you ever wondered where the wastewater and material go? Down the sink? And to where before it gets drained.
Saucy remnants of the food first go into a grease trap.
Grease traps mainly deal with FOG, which are fats, oils, and gases. With the mixture of these materials with water down the sink. A grease trap separates the contents so that wastewater can be effectively drained. Fats and oils are less dense than water, thus floating in a layer above the liquid, solid components will sink to the bottom of the liquid. A baffle wall allows only the water to pass through where it is drained.
Grease traps are nasty work. Yes, they are dirty and reek of a month’s worth of waste. When the water is discarded, the remnants of the oils and solids create an unpleasant sludge where it has to be cleaned out in order for the kitchen to not smell. These are some materials that you will need to clean up a grease trap.
Most of the time the day’s worth of washing dishes will leave the grease trap containing an unpleasant slush and materials. That is why a glove is important as using your bare hands will be unsanitary. However, do keep in mind the depth of the grease trap as wastewater might leak into the gloves. Do not, however, clean a grease trap with a wound or cut, the germs and bacteria in the wastewater will infect the wound.
As the solid materials are submerged in the slush, a small sieve is used to seave out the clumps of waste materials. This makes cleaning the grease trap easier in the end.
A bucket is used to discard the brown liquid at the end of the grease trap once a majority of the waste materials have been removed.
Since the grease trap is made of metal, a sturdy scrub is used to scrub away the unwanted liquid stuck onto the wall of the grease trap.
A detergent used for cleaning and polishing sinks will be good enough for a grease trap. However, please keep using gloves when cleaning the grease trap as the detergent is far too harsh for naked skin.
If this task is far too unpleasant, there are companies that provide residential grease trap cleaning in KL. Where grease traps are professionally cleaned and leave the kitchen with no smell of the waste materials.