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Why Your Facility Needs Regular Commercial Drain Maintenance
Monday, May 13, 2024
drain care
Why Your Facility Needs Regular Commercial Drain Maintenance
Drain problems like clogs, backups, odors, and pipe damage can be seriously disruptive and costly to your facility. But still, you have a budget and other tasks to attend to—will commercial drain cleaners really be worth the time and expense, or can your facility get by without preventative drain maintenance?
At State Chemical, we manufacture and distribute chemical and biological solutions for various applications, including preventative drain care. Before you see drain problems for yourself, you probably aren’t thinking about them, but without regular maintenance, they’re bound to happen eventually.
To help you understand the importance of commercial drain maintenance, we will explain the consequences of foregoing regular drain maintenance and how commercial drain cleaners can help. After reading, you’ll understand the value of preventative drain maintenance.
What Happens When Commercial Facilities Skip Preventative Drain Maintenance
Of course, no one is forcing you to use a drain cleaner—and you don’t have to use one if it’s not in the cards for your facility. However, if you opt out of preventative maintenance, it’s important to understand the potential outcomes you could be dealing with down the line.
Slow Drains
The first sign of a drain issue will often be a slow drain. When you run water, it might take several minutes to empty, leaving you to watch and wait for the water to deplete. This can make any task more frustrating—just think about dirty water sitting idly in the mop basin when you’re trying to finish closing tasks.
When you actively use a drain, it’s virtually impossible to prevent organics from going down the drain with the water. These organics can include fats, oils, and greases (FOGs), food scraps, soap scum, hair, and more—even the body oil from washing your hands can contribute to buildup.
When these substances go down the drain, they tend to congeal and catch on other items in the pipes (e.g., fruit peels might get stuck to fat buildup). Over time, this will limit available pipe space, and water will take longer to drain. To solve this issue, you’ll have to use a drain opener, snake the drain, or call a plumber to clear the buildup.
Meanwhile, if you use preventative drain maintenance from the jump, this buildup is broken up before it can form, allowing particles to easily pass through the sewer lines with the water. This way, slow drains and other issues won’t happen in the first place.
Drain Clogs
While slow drains mean water takes longer than usual to drain, drain clogs cause water not to empty at all. When substances other than water go down your drain, they build and congeal. Sometimes, this can be so severe that the pipe becomes fully blocked. Other times, a foreign object can get caught in already-formed buildup and cause a clog.
Think about cooking oil going down your drain. Over time, this oil hardens and congeals, leaving residue to cake onto the sides of your pipes. This is already a problem on its own, but if a foreign item like an eggshell were to go down the drain by mistake, it’s more likely to get stuck in this gunky oil buildup as well. As time goes on, this type of buildup will fully block your drain, leading to a clog.
However, if you use a drain cleaner to break down buildup before it starts to create issues, you can prevent these kinds of clogs. Then, you won’t have to scramble to clear a clog down the line.
Odors
Odors are another outcome of FOG buildup in your drain. Just as food would rot in a trash can, organics will rot after they go down your drain, and it’s something you’ll be able to smell in the areas surrounding the drain (especially when these substances repeatedly get caught in the pipes).
With preventative maintenance to counteract FOG buildup, odors shouldn’t be a problem. However, without it, you will experience foul odors, which can be a serious turnoff for customers as well as an annoyance for your staff.
Drain Flies
Have you ever noticed an abundance of gnats hanging around your facility’s kitchen, bathrooms, or floor drains? These probably aren’t gnats but drain flies, which live and breed in drain FOG buildup.
If you don’t preventatively treat your drain, FOG buildup will compile, and you’ll be at risk of a drain fly infestation. Then, you’ll need to invest in a drain cleaner anyway to eliminate their habitats and deter them from your drain.
Drain cleaners can be used to treat a drain fly problem preventatively or reactively. It may seem easy to wait until you see evidence of an issue, but if you can avoid it altogether, you won’t have to worry about health code violations or the ensuing rush to get these pests out of your facility.
Pipe Deterioration
FOG buildup can also be a major contributor to pipe deterioration.
If you never conduct preventative drain maintenance for your facility, FOGs will build in your pipes over the years. Your pipes may have initially been four inches wide, but with FOG buildup, that free space can dwindle into mere centimeters.
Now, imagine that all this buildup was pushed into one of your deeper pipes over the years. This particular pipe happens to run directly under your facility’s parking lot, and its buildup of congealed food scraps and grease is five feet long. Water will no longer come out at the other end of the pipe—you have a complete blockage.
At this point, a drain snake cannot reach the issue, and chemical drain openers can’t burn through five straight feet of buildup. You’ll have to tear up your parking lot just for the plumber to be able to reach the pipe and clean it out.
This would be bad enough as it is, but after years of this gunk building up in your pipes, it’s possible it might have led to pipe rot. To treat this, you’ll need to replace the affected pipes, meaning more downtime, further interruption, and higher costs.
If you don’t treat it, your water will continue to leak into the ground rather than draining properly. When left unrepaired, this can eventually lead the ground to cave in.
Preventative maintenance may seem like a small thing. It’s probably not something you even think about most of the time. But when it comes to drain care, you only have two options: preventative maintenance or reactive maintenance. Drain problems may start minor, but over time, not caring for your drain can have destructive outcomes.
Commercial Drain Cleaners Prevent Downtime from Clogs, Odors, and Pipe Damage
The solution to these negative consequences is to regularly use a commercial drain cleaner for preventative maintenance.
Commercial drain cleaners contain either an emulsifying chemical or a biological to break down FOG buildup in pipes. Once dispensed into the drain, these products liquefy or digest FOG buildup so it can pass easily through the drain with the water.
These products can be routinely poured into drains by hand, or they can be hooked up to an automated drain pump for regular, hands-free maintenance. In either case, drain cleaners ensure that buildup is dealt with from the moment it enters the drain.
By removing buildup before it forms, drain cleaners eliminate the source of odors, slow drains, clogs, backups, and overflows, as well as prolong the lifespan of drainpipes. Once you add drain cleaners to your maintenance routine, you’ll experience significantly fewer drain problems and interruptions.
Learn How Grease-B-Gone® Can Keep Your Drains Clear from Buildup
Drain problems are disruptive and inconvenient for any facility, but until they happen, drain maintenance can easily be out of sight and out of mind. Now that you understand the consequences of opting out of preventative drain maintenance, watch the video below to learn how State Chemical’s Grease-B-Gone® can keep your drains clear of buildup.
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