By Matthew Baring-Gould, Kingscliff-based drainage plumber. Servicing Tweed Heads for 4 years. 5.0 stars across 173 Google reviews. Licensed NSW 383340C and QLD 15036450. ABN 74 605 392 348.
Historical case study from Matty’s archive. A Brisbane commercial kitchen had flooded. Owner had been skipping grease trap servicing to save money. The fat deposits built up in the main HDPE line until it closed off entirely, water had nowhere to go, and the floor started filling up.
What was wrong
A commercial kitchen produces an enormous volume of fat and grease every service. Even a well-run kitchen cannot avoid putting some fat down the drain; what the grease trap does is intercept it before it hits the main sewer. If you do not service the trap, it fills, and the main sewer starts collecting fat as well. Fat solidifies against the pipe wall, closes the diameter, and eventually blocks completely.
On this job the HDPE line running from the kitchen was almost closed from fat. The customer called in panic because they had flooded during service and could not operate.
What we did
- Shut the kitchen down for 1 to 2 hours, unavoidable, since we were working through the floor drains.
- Hydrojet into the main line with hot water assist, which is critical for fat. Cold water on hard fat does very little.
- Multiple passes to break down the deposits layer by layer.
- CCTV camera down the full run to confirm the line was clear and the pipe wall was clean, not just a hole punched through the middle of the fat.
- Walked the owner through the camera footage so they could see what the pipe actually looked like inside.
- Recommendation: service the grease trap every month minimum for a kitchen this size, not when the smell gets bad.
The economics
Owner had been saving maybe a few hundred dollars a month by not servicing the grease trap on schedule. The emergency call-out plus kitchen down-time plus the hydrojet work cost multiples of that. Routine servicing is dramatically cheaper than emergency.
Call Matty on 0447 188 394 for commercial drainage, grease trap servicing and emergency kitchen call-outs across the Tweed, Gold Coast and inner Brisbane.
Customer names and addresses have been withheld. Individual results vary. Drain Masters Plumbing is licensed in NSW (383340C) and QLD (15036450).
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