Maintain Commercial Kitchen To Prevent Clogged Grease Traps
When you prepare and serve food in a professional setting, your commercial kitchen is the lifeblood of your business. It’s essential that your kitchen stays in top running condition, for both your business and your customers.
Not only that, but your kitchen equipment is an extensive investment that’s meant to last a long time, so you’ll want to do everything you can to protect it. Here are 10 maintenance tips that will help you prolong the life of your kitchen, equipment, and investment.
Simplify Your Operation
A commercial kitchen is easier to maintain if there are less moving parts. If you install The Drain Strainer, this will solve several problems. You won’t have a commercial garbage disposal that needs to be repaired or replaced and you won’t need to get your grease trap pumped as often.
The Drain Strainer is an excellent investment when you consider how much times it saves you from solving these headaches and allowing your kitchen to be productive.
Make Sure Your Employees Follow Best Practices
You need a solid set of best practices for every procedure in your kitchen. Whether it’s how to do food prep, how to cook a menu item or how to clean at the end of the night. There’s always the right way and the wrong way to do just about every job in the restaurant.
Develop a list of best practices and allow you top performers to help put together these procedures that must be followed. As long as someone follows the best practice, they can’t get in trouble. And if someone comes up with a better way to do something, the best practice can immediately get updated.
Not only will this make your operation run more smoothly, but you’ll also be able to make sure that the proper safety measures are being followed, and any safety concerns are handled promptly and correctly.
Clean Your Commercial Kitchen Equipment Daily
Dirty, grimy, greasy, clogged parts and equipment has to work harder to function properly, and often times it can’t, or won’t. This puts unnecessary stress on your commercial kitchen equipment, causing it to fail prematurely and cost you in repairs and replacements.
Daily cleaning removes the problems before they have time to build up, allowing your equipment to work the way it should for a long time. Not only that, but daily cleaning also addresses health code and safety issues.
Don’t Forget To Do Thorough Cleanings
While daily cleanings will take care of the majority of the dirt and grease build-up, they can’t catch it all. Over time, it can cake up and clog the parts you don’t look at every day, reducing efficiency and function.
To keep things running in top condition, you’ll want to routinely do thorough, top to bottom, inside and out cleanings of all of your equipment. How often you do this will likely depend on how much wear it sees and what it handles.
These more thorough cleanings may need to happen overnight or at times the kitchen is normally closed. What you choose depends on your business and your team.
Inspect Regularly
The best time to catch issues is when they’re still small, or before they even become an actual issue. The best way to do this is by inspecting all of your kitchen equipment regularly.
One great time to do your inspections is when you’re doing your routine tear-down and cleaning of the equipment. You’ll already be going over every nook and cranny of it, so it’ll take no time at all to check and make sure everything is in good working order.
Fix Issues Immediately
When you do spot a problem, it’s important that you get it taken care of as soon as possible. No matter how small the problem may seem, it can still have a huge effect on how the equipment functions, or doesn’t.
Not only will this prolong the life of your equipment, but it’ll save you money in the long run. You won’t be shelling out for larger repairs, or full-out replacements, for something that didn’t seem like a big deal.
Eliminate Problems By Design
Rather than fight the same battles over and over, it’s a better use of your time coming up with a permanent solution to completely eliminate the problem. If you’re having a problem with your grease traps getting clogged from food debris, instead of paying a grease trap cleaning service to come out more often, it makes more sense to prevent the food debris from clogging up the grease trap in the first place by installing The Drain Strainer to capture the food debris.
Keep Spare Parts On Hand
Through age and daily wear and tear, it’s expected that some things are going to break on your equipment. This is why it’s important to always have a backup plan
For small, easily replaced parts like knobs, bulbs, nuts, and bolts, and so on, it’s important to keep extras on hand for easy fixes. This way, you’re back up and running in no time and you won’t have a crisis in the middle of a busy rush. You also won’t be causing further damage to your equipment by using it in its broken condition.
Don’t Be Pennywise And Pound Foolish
At some point in the life of your commercial kitchen equipment, it’s likely that you’ll have to perform emergency repairs to keep your kitchen up and running. While this is fine if you’re in a pinch, it’s best not to make a habit of it.
If your commercial garbage disposal is leaking, the long term solution isn’t putting a bucket underneath it to catch the drips. And there’s no sense in having a repairman come out over and over again to replace leaking seals or a burned out motor.
The best long term solution is finding the best commercial garbage disposal alternative that eliminates these problems once and for all.
Set Up A Regular Maintenance Schedule
Just like your health, preventative maintenance is one of the best ways to care for your commercial kitchen equipment.
When you work side-by-side with a trained professional, you’re protecting the investment you made, while ensuring that your kitchen, and your business, runs as smooth as it possibly can.
It’s important to remember that your drains are an important part of your kitchen equipment, especially in the dish room.
If you’re worried about your drains or your garbage disposal system, we have solutions that can help ease your mind. We can help you stop worrying about where your food waste goes when you drain your sinks and help you start focusing on running your kitchen more smoothly.