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Bacon Grease Down The Drain

By 18 December 2019January 6th, 2023Winnipeg plumbers

You’ve brought home the bacon and now it’s time to get cooking. You turn on the stove or oven, you get your sheet pan or your skillet all ready to go, and you start frying. You smell that smoky, salty, bacon-y goodness. You hear the sizzle and pop of the grease and you know it’s going to be delicious. You remove the cooked bacon from its pan, put it on a plate, and then you pour all the grease down the drain.

 

Something’s not right with this picture.

Back in World War II, it was your patriotic duty to not waste that delicious bacon grease. That’s because bacon fat could be used to make bombs. Nowadays, though, there’s (thankfully) no mass conflict requiring all hands on deck. Phew! That means you can pour that bacon grease down the drain, right?

 

No! Why do you want this so badly?

When you pour bacon grease down the drain in its liquid form, it doesn’t just slide on through the sewer system with no problems. Bacon fat congeals. It swells and it clogs. It takes up as much space as it possibly can and it is solid and sticky enough to be difficult to get out of your pipes. Down the line, it can cause problems with the city’s sewer system – so many problems, in fact, that the City of Winnipeg mandated that all commercial establishments that serve food must install grease traps.

 

Sorry dear reader, you can’t just pour and forget – that grease will come back to haunt you. What are you to do instead? Wait until the fat congeals and then scrape the congealed fat into the garbage? Yes!  

 

The more industrious among you might want to do a little more with all that saved fat – it’s pretty versatile for cooking and whatever you cook is going to be bacon-infused, which, given you’re reading an article about bacon grease, we have to assume you’re going to love.

 

Okay, so now you know you shouldn’t be pouring grease down the drain. But what can you do about all the grease that’s already in your pipes, clogging everything up and causing you grief? Simple – you call us! We do drain cleaning in Winnipeg. That includes bacon-infused drains, root-clogged drains, and any other blocked drains. We also offer preventive maintenance plans so your drains can be inspected and cleaned out on a regular basis.  

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