Drain cleaning, also known as “hydro jetting” or “unclogging a drain” is a common service we provide for restaurants in the throughout Oregon and Washington. Many restaurants refer to this service as a “rooter” service.
What Is Drain Cleaning?
Drain cleaning is the process of clearing your drains out. If you’re turning on your sinks and they’re backing up or you are running your dishwasher and notice the floor drain starts to bubble up, it’s because you have a blockage somewhere inside your restaurant’s pipes that either run into the grease trap or discharge to the sewer.
If you notice any of these things happening we will hydro jet your lines in order to clear it. This isn’t “snaking.” Snaking is a method used for forcing out a blockage. Our hydro jetting process both pushes water forward and pulls it back, which clears the line all the way out.
How Restaurant Drains Get Clogged
If you’re not pumping out your grease trap frequently enough, your drain can get clogged. The whole purpose of your grease trap is to capture the grease before it goes to the sewer main.
If your grease trap hasn’t been getting cleaned correctly, or frequently enough the food waste being discharged from your sinks will start to bypass the trap. Once your food waste begins to bypass the grease trap it gets caught in the drains and begins to close the lines. As the line begins to close up, you’ll probably notice your sinks start to drain more slowly than they should. At this point you have a partial blockage in one or more of your pipes. Eventually, your lines will close all the way up and need to be cleared.
Why choose NW Biofuel for your drain cleaning needs rather than a rooter company?
Nine times out of ten, other companies will come in and blast your line from the sinks into the grease trap. Then they’ll open your grease trap and tell you that you need to get your grease trap cleaned, too. Unfortunately they will not be equipped to pump-out your grease trap after they are done. The problem with this approach is that after they are done everything that was blasted into your grease trap will remain inside of it until it either gets pumped-out or discharges through the outlet and to the sewer, a municipal violation that can also cause another back up in the near future.
What we find is that many times, you don’t need your drains to be cleaned, you just need your grease trap to be pumped out.
If you have a backup, you might need to have your drains cleaned, but often just pumping out your grease trap will do the trick. Sometimes you need both. If it turns out that you need both drain cleaning and grease trap cleaning, we will be able to provide both services in one visit.
The benefit of using NW Biofuel is we can do both. That’s the beauty of our service – one truck comes out on site and that can handle both services for you. Other rooter services cannot do this because they don’t operate vacuum trucks, they pull a jetter on a trailer with no way to remove any of the waste in the lines or grease trap.