A blocked kitchen waste run stops service. We clear and maintain the drains behind pubs, restaurants and commercial kitchens — grease-packed pipework jetted properly, cellar and yard drains kept moving, and visits timed around your opening hours rather than ours.
Fat, oil and grease leave a commercial kitchen as warm liquid and travel maybe a few metres before they cool. What happens next is the entire problem: the deposit sets on the pipe wall, catches everything that passes it afterwards, and narrows the bore a little more each service. Nothing looks wrong for months. Then one Friday the pot wash won't drain and there are eighty people booked in for dinner.
That is why dosing the sink rarely fixes it. Enzyme and caustic products act at the point you pour them, while the blockage is usually sitting further down the run — often in the length between the kitchen and the yard where the pipe is coolest. The deposit has to be cut off the pipe wall and flushed out, which means high-pressure jetting rather than rodding a hole through the middle of it.
The other half of the job is knowing where it will happen next. Kitchen waste runs, cellar drains and yard gullies fail in fairly predictable places, and a site that gets jetted on a schedule stops producing emergencies.
External drainage only — the pipework outside the building, from the kitchen wall out to the sewer.
The line from the pot wash, prep sinks and combi drain out to the yard. This is where grease sets hardest and where most mid-service failures start. Jetted back to the pipe wall, not bored through.
The gratings under prep areas and the channel running past the fryers. They collect food solids and grease in equal measure, and they are usually the first thing to smell.
Beer line waste, cleaning chemicals, spilt product and the occasional bottle top all end up in the cellar drain. Blocked sump wells flood cellars, and a flooded cellar is stock as well as mess.
Silt, cardboard pulp and grease washed off the bins. These block quietly and then back up across the yard on the first heavy rain, usually onto the delivery route.
A separator only protects the pipework downstream of it. We clear and maintain the run it discharges into, and tell you plainly if the trap itself is undersized or being overwhelmed.
Wipes, hand towels and sanitary products, most of it out of your control. Same-day clearance matters when it is the only customer toilet you have.
Planned work goes in when the kitchen is cold. Emergencies are a different conversation.
Worth knowing before an inspection or a letter from the water company, rather than after.
Grease is not only your drainage problem — it is also the sewer's. Under the Water Industry Act 1991 it is an offence to discharge into a public sewer anything likely to interfere with the free flow of it, and water companies do use that against premises whose fat is turning up in the main. Building regulations guidance points commercial kitchens towards a grease separator sized to the BS EN 1825 standard, and environmental health officers increasingly expect to see evidence that drainage is being maintained rather than a verbal assurance.
Practically, that means three things: have something in place to intercept the grease, keep the run downstream of it clear, and keep the paperwork that shows you did. We can help with the second and third. If your separator is undersized for the number of meals you now serve, we will say so — it is a cheaper conversation than the one that follows a discharge notice.
It depends on how busy the kitchen is, what is on the menu, and how much of the grease is being intercepted before it reaches the drain. A busy fryer-heavy kitchen may need it monthly; a smaller site with a well-sized separator might be fine quarterly. We would rather set the interval from what the first couple of visits actually find than sell you a standard package on day one.
The line is answered 24 hours a day by a person rather than a voicemail, and a kitchen that cannot drain is treated as an emergency. On the phone we will work out whether it is the main run or a single appliance, because that changes how fast it needs an engineer and what we bring.
Yes, and for planned work it is usually the only sensible option. Jetting a kitchen waste run mid-service helps nobody, so scheduled visits go in early morning, during the afternoon lull or after close.
[CONFIRM BEFORE LAUNCH — see build note above. State plainly whether Sam's Drains empties separators and tankers the waste away under a registered waste carrier licence, subcontracts it, or only jets the discharge line downstream of the trap.]
It depends on your tenancy or lease, and drainage is one of the areas where the split is often unclear. Broadly, the pipework serving your premises tends to sit with the occupier while structural drainage failures sit with the freeholder, but your agreement overrides any general rule. We can invoice either party, and we supply photos and a written report so whoever is being asked to pay can see what was found.
Grease, and it is not close. After that: food solids from prep areas, blue roll and wipes in the washrooms, coffee grounds, and in cellars the bottle tops and debris that find their way into the sump. Yard gullies fail differently — silt and cardboard pulp washed off the bin area.
Yes. Photos, CCTV footage where a survey is done, and a written report of what was found and what was carried out. It is worth keeping — evidence that drainage is actively maintained is far more useful during an inspection than a verbal assurance.
We will tell you. Shared sewers and lateral drains beyond your boundary are generally the water company's to fix, and we would rather point you to a free repair than invoice you for one.
Call any hour and you'll speak to someone who can book an engineer — no call-out fee, fixed price agreed before we start.