Table of Contents
The short answer
A restaurant kitchen stays clean by timetable, because grease arrives on a timetable too. Every service sends it three ways: up into the hood, onto the floor and the surfaces around the cooking line, and down the drains into the grease trap. A workable schedule has four layers: jobs done during and after each shift, jobs done at the close of every day, weekly jobs and monthly jobs. A few more are handed to a specialist at an interval set by how much the kitchen cooks.
Most of the list belongs to the kitchen's own staff, because it has to happen while the kitchen is running. Three jobs do not: degreasing the extract duct above the hood, clearing a blocked drain line, and emptying the grease trap.
IHR Dream Cleaning's part is specific. Our grease trap cleaning service removes the grease and sludge, cleans the inside of the trap and takes the waste away, quoted by the size of the trap and how much has built up. This guide sets out the whole schedule, explains why a trap is emptied before it complains, and says plainly which jobs we do and which belong to someone else.
Where the grease goes: air, floor and drain
A home kitchen cooks for an hour or two a day. A commercial line may run fryers, a grill and a range from late morning until midnight. The fat that leaves the pans goes in three directions, and each ends in a part of the building that somebody has to clean.
- Into the air. Hot vapour carries droplets of fat up into the canopy. The filters catch most of it. The rest settles in the duct and on the fan.
- Onto surfaces. Spatter and settling vapour coat the wall behind the line, the equipment, the ceiling and, most of all, the floor.
- Down the drain. Pot washing, dish washing and floor washing send fat and food particles into the sinks and floor drains, and on to the grease trap.
Why it is a timetable and not a judgement
Fresh grease is soft and wipes off with a detergent. Left on a warm surface it hardens into a sticky amber varnish that needs strong alkaline products, time and scraping, so a job that takes minutes daily takes hours monthly. The chemistry is the same as at home, as our guide to degreasing a hood, hob and cabinets explains. The quantities are not.
All three routes also fail out of sight. A filter can look fine from the pass while the duct behind it is lined with fat, and a trap gives almost no warning before it overflows. A date on a wall chart is the only signal that arrives in time.
What Abu Dhabi adds
Heat shortens every interval. Food waste and grease turn sour faster in a hot bin store or an outdoor trap chamber, and cockroaches are active all year. Hard tap water scales dishwashers and pot-wash sinks, and rough scale holds grease. In Ramadan the busy hours move to the evening, and the close-down clean moves with them. Many kitchens also sit inside a mall or a tower podium, where the main drain, a large grease interceptor and the extract riser may be shared between tenants and managed by the landlord.
The schedule: each shift, daily, weekly and monthly
Treat the lists below as a starting point for a kitchen that cooks with oil every day. Your food-safety plan and the conditions of your licence come first. Where they ask for more than this, follow them.
| When | Main jobs | Done by |
|---|---|---|
| Each shift | Scrape and strain, wipe the line, spills, fryer oil | Kitchen staff |
| Daily, at close | Filters, equipment, walls behind the line, floor, drain baskets | Kitchen staff |
| Weekly | Inside the canopy, behind equipment, drain channels, stores | Staff or booked cleaners |
| Monthly | Ceiling and high surfaces, walls, shelving, record check | Staff or booked cleaners |
| By volume | Duct degreased, grease trap emptied, pest-control visit | Specialists |
During and after each shift
These jobs stop grease from setting and keep it out of the drains. Each takes a few minutes, and each is harder the next morning.
- Scrape plates, pans and trays into the food-waste bin before they reach the sink. What goes in the bin never reaches the trap.
- Empty the sink strainers into the bin, not down the drain, and put them back.
- Wipe the cooking line, the pass and the splashback while they are still warm.
- Put spent fryer oil into its closed container. It never goes into a sink, a floor drain or a general waste bin.
- Scrape, degrease and dry a spill on the floor before the next person walks through it.
Daily, at close
The close-down clean runs from the top of the kitchen to the floor and from dry work to wet, so nothing that has been cleaned is soiled again. Switch off the cooking equipment and let it cool first.
- Clear and store all food. Lift out the hood filters and put them to soak, or through the dishwasher if the maker allows it.
- Clean the cooking equipment: grill plates, range tops, fryer exteriors, oven doors and drip trays.
- Wash the wall and splashback behind the line and the sides of the equipment.
- Clean and then sanitise food-contact surfaces in the way your food-safety plan sets out.
- Wash the sinks and taps, and empty the strainers one last time.
- Sweep the floor, including under the equipment. Sweeping first keeps solids out of the drains.
- Apply degreaser in hot water, leave it for the label time, scrub with a deck brush, pull the dirty water to the floor drains with a squeegee, and rinse.
- Lift the floor-drain gratings, empty the baskets into the bin, rinse them and put them back.
- Take out the waste, wash the bins, and refit the dry filters before the fan is next switched on.
Weekly
Weekly jobs reach the places the close-down clean passes over, and suit the quietest day.
- Inside the canopy: the channel the filters sit in, the inner faces and the grease trough. Keep liquid away from light fittings and from the fire-suppression nozzles.
- Behind and beneath equipment that is on castors. This is where pests feed undisturbed.
- The floor drains and channels themselves, not only the baskets: the channel walls and the underside of the gratings.
- The dishwasher and the pot-wash sink, descaled and degreased.
- The floors of the walk-in chiller, the dry store, the staff area and the bin store.
- A look into the grease trap, if it has a lid that staff are allowed to open, with a note in the log.
Monthly
Monthly jobs deal with slow build-up and with the records that prove the specialist work was done.
- Ceiling tiles, vents, light covers and high pipework above the cooking area. Grease on a ceiling eventually drips.
- Walls from top to bottom, doors and frames, and shelving emptied and washed.
- A walk round with the pest-control record: droppings, gnaw marks, gaps round pipes.
- A check of the specialist dates: the last duct clean, the last trap clean, the last service of the suppression system.
Adjusting it to your kitchen
The intervals depend on what is cooked, not on the size of the room. Frying, grilling, wok cooking and charcoal put far more grease into the air and the drains than baking, boiling or reheating. A grill or shawarma line needs its filters washed daily and its trap attended to often. A café that warms pastries can stretch most of the weekly jobs, though milk fat and coffee grounds still reach its trap. Change one interval at a time and watch the result.
The hood: filters, canopy and the duct beyond them
The canopy over the cooking line carries heat, smoke and steam out of the room and stops the grease in that air from travelling through the building. The filters are the working part. Most are baffle filters: rows of angled steel channels that force the air to change direction sharply. The air turns, the heavier droplets of fat do not, and they hit the metal and run down into a trough or a cup.
A coated filter cannot do this. The fan moves less air, the kitchen gets hotter and smokier, and more fat gets past the filter into the duct. The filter wash decides how fast everything behind the filter gets dirty.
What kitchen staff can do
Filters are made to be lifted out by hand, washed in a hot degreasing solution and dried before refitting. Never run the line with a filter missing, even for one service, because the duct then takes the full load. Switch the fan off before reaching into the canopy, wait for the metal to cool, and work from a stable step, never from the top of a range or a fryer.
The duct and the fan
No filter catches everything, so a film of fat builds along the duct and on the extract fan. That film is fuel. A flare-up on the grill can light it, and a fire inside a duct travels through walls and floors where nobody can reach it. Weaker extraction and a rancid smell when the fan starts are the earlier signs.
Degreasing a duct is specialist work. It needs access panels along the run, safe access to a fan that is often on a roof, and a report with photographs taken before and after. It is not a job for kitchen staff or general cleaners, and it is not part of our service. Our kitchen cleaning page says so directly: removable filters are degreased, built-in ducting is not.
We give no interval for duct cleaning, because the one that applies to you is set by others: the fire-safety requirements for your building, your landlord and your insurer. Ask each what they require and what record they want to see, and book a duct-cleaning contractor to that interval.
Floors and floor drains
Mopping alone does not clean a kitchen floor. A mop spreads a thin film of grease evenly across the tiles, and the floor dries dull and slippery. What works is the sequence in the daily list, because the scrubbing breaks the film and the squeegee takes it away. Grout lines and the texture of anti-slip tiles hold grease below the level a mop reaches, which is why a deck brush or a scrubbing machine is needed every week.
How a floor drain is built, and what blocks it
A commercial floor drain has three parts: the grating you walk on, a removable basket beneath it that catches solids, and a water seal below that, which stops sewer air from coming back up. The pipe then runs to the grease trap. The basket is the part that is meant to be emptied. If it is left out, or left full, rice, bones, cling film and cloths go down the line, and fat sets around them.
- Sweep before washing down, every time.
- Empty the baskets into the bin each day, never into the drain they came from.
- Never push solids through a grating with a hose or a squeegee.
- Pour a jug of clean water into any drain that is rarely used, so that its water seal does not dry out and let the smell through.
When a drain is slow or backs up
Water standing over a grating, or dirty water rising in the floor drain when the pot-wash sink is released, points to a restriction further along. Check the basket first, then the date of the last trap clean. If the trap has just been emptied and the drain is still slow, the line itself is blocked.
Do not reach for a chemical drain opener. In a kitchen line it meets a mass of fat it cannot dissolve, sits in the pipe, and becomes a burn hazard for whoever opens the drain next, as do drain cleaners work explains. Stop using the affected sinks and have the line cleared mechanically. Our drainage and pipe unclogging service covers sinks and floor drains, with main-line work confirmed once the access has been checked, and urgent blockages are often attended the same day.
How a grease trap works, and why it is emptied on a schedule
A grease trap, also called a grease interceptor, is a tank set in the waste line between the kitchen and the sewer. Small ones sit under or beside the pot-wash sink and fill fast. Larger ones are set into the floor or into a chamber outside and are emptied by suction. All of them rely on the same two facts: fat is lighter than water, and it sets as it cools.
Waste water enters the tank and slows down. Given time and a drop in temperature, fat, oil and grease rise and form a floating layer, while heavier food particles sink and form a sludge on the bottom. Baffles inside the tank hold both layers back. The outlet draws from the clearer water in between, and that water goes on to the sewer.
| Layer | What it is | If it is left |
|---|---|---|
| Top | Floating fat, oil and grease | Thickens until it reaches the outlet and passes through |
| Middle | Clearer water on its way out | Shrinks, so waste has less time to separate |
| Bottom | Settled food solids | Rots, smells and takes up working volume |
Why the date matters more than the symptom
A trap does not remove grease from the building. It stores it. Every day the floating layer gets thicker and the sludge deeper, and the band of clear water between them gets thinner. Waste water then crosses the tank faster, so a trap works worst exactly when it is fullest. Past a certain point fat leaves through the outlet, cools in the pipe beyond and sets on the pipe wall. That is the blockage that closes a kitchen, and it forms downstream of the trap, where it is harder to reach.
The settled food, decomposing in warm, still water, is the source of the smell. Our service page lists the signs of a full trap: slow-draining kitchen sinks, a smell near the kitchen drain, grease visible at the drain, and no clear record of the last clean. By the time the first appears, the trap has been overloaded for some while, and the last is reason enough to treat it as overdue.
How often
There is no single interval. It depends on the size of the trap and on how much fat and food the kitchen sends to it. Our published guidance is that restaurants and busy commercial kitchens usually need a clean monthly or more often, and that small cafés need it less frequently. A rule of thumb used widely in the trade is that a trap is due once the floating grease and the settled solids together take up about a quarter of its depth, because separation falls away quickly beyond that.
Treat both as guides and not as the rule for your premises, which is set by your sewerage company's terms and any condition in your licence or lease. For a new kitchen, have the trap looked at before the first service, since a fit-out often leaves builders' debris in it. Then start on the cautious side and adjust after two or three visits according to how full the trap was.
What helps a trap, and what harms it
- Scraping and dry-wiping pans before washing helps more than anything else, and strainers in every sink keep food out of the sludge layer.
- Very hot water poured through a trap does not clean it. It melts the floating layer and carries it out of the outlet, to set further down the line.
- Products sold to dissolve or disperse grease in a trap tend to do the same thing: they move the fat on and do not remove it. Ask your sewerage company before using any additive.
- A lid left loose, cracked or without its seal lets the smell into the kitchen and pests into the trap.
What a grease trap clean involves
Emptying a trap properly is more than pumping off the top. On our service page the visit has five parts.
- Confirm the trap. Its size and location are agreed when you book, so that the right equipment and enough time are allowed.
- Remove the grease and the sludge. The floating layer and the settled solids both come out, which is the core of the job.
- Clean the inside. The walls and the baffles are cleaned of the residue that removal alone leaves behind, because a skin of old fat seeds the next build-up.
- Treat the odour at its source, by dealing with the residue that causes it, and not by masking it afterwards.
- Take the waste away for disposal in line with local waste-handling requirements.
What to check before the lid goes back
Our technician shows you the emptied, scraped trap, and the inlet and outlet running clear, before closing it. Look for bare walls, baffles back in their slots, and a lid that seats flat with its seal in place. Then write the visit in the kitchen's log: the date, who did the work, roughly how full the trap was, and anything that was noticed, such as a damaged baffle or a corroded lid.
What the rules in Abu Dhabi cover, and who to ask
Three bodies have a say in a kitchen's grease: one for what goes into the sewer, one for where the waste goes once it is taken out, and one for the hygiene of the kitchen itself. We set out only what we have read on the official pages. For everything else, your licence conditions and the authority's current guidance are the rule, and no cleaning company's summary replaces them.
What goes into the sewer
Waste water from a commercial kitchen is not treated as household sewage. Abu Dhabi's Trade Effluent Control Regulations 2022, issued by the Department of Energy and in force since January 2022, apply to every business that discharges trade effluent to a sewerage system in the emirate. As published in October 2026, they prohibit discharging any substance that will obstruct a sewer because of its quantity or nature, which is exactly what congealed fat does.
The regulations list restaurants and cafés, including fast food and takeaways, as a low-risk type of trade effluent. Low risk does not mean unregulated. Such a discharge has to follow the sewerage company's terms and conditions and a code of practice for that type of business, and the premises are inspected under that code. The regulations say the code defines how any pre-treatment device is sized, operated and maintained, how often the premises are inspected, and which records the business has to keep. In a kitchen, the pre-treatment device is in practice the grease trap.
The regulations do not themselves say how often a trap must be cleaned. That sits in the code, which we have not seen published. Ask the sewerage company that serves your premises, or your landlord if the connection is theirs, for the current code for restaurants and cafés, and set your trap interval and your records to it.
Where the waste goes
What comes out of a trap is a mixture of fat, rotting food and dirty water. It cannot go into a general waste bin or back into a drain further along. In general terms it is pumped or lifted into sealed containers or a tanker and taken to a facility permitted to receive it. Spent cooking oil is a separate stream, kept in closed containers and handed to a collector.
According to the Abu Dhabi Media Office, as published in October 2026, the Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi has since 2024 been the body that issues licences to environmental service providers for waste collection and transport, trading and treatment. The practical step for an operator is simple. Ask whoever removes your trap waste and your used oil how and where it is disposed of, and keep a dated record of every collection.
The kitchen itself, and the file that covers all three
Food hygiene in Abu Dhabi's food businesses is the field of the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority, and we have not quoted its requirements. Your licence conditions and the authority's current guidance say what your cleaning programme, records and pest control must include, so check this guide's schedule against them before you pin it to the wall.
One file answers all three bodies, and a landlord or an insurer as well: the cleaning schedule with initials against each job, the date of each trap clean and who did it, the collection notes for trap waste and used oil, the duct-cleaning report and the pest-control visit sheets.
Who does what: staff, cleaners and specialists
No single company usually does everything in a restaurant, and a quote that says it does deserves questions. The work divides by skill and by equipment.
| Job | Normally done by | Where IHR fits |
|---|---|---|
| Shift and close-down cleaning | Kitchen staff | Not ours: it happens during service |
| Periodic kitchen clean | Staff or cleaners by the hour | Hourly cleaners, scope confirmed first |
| Dining room, office, washrooms | Staff or cleaners by the hour | Hourly cleaners, as for an office |
| Extract duct and fan | Duct-cleaning specialist | Not part of our service |
| Blocked drain line | Drainage technician | Drainage and pipe unclogging |
| Grease trap emptying | Grease-trap service | Grease trap cleaning |
| Pest control | Pest-control company | Pest control service |
What IHR does in a restaurant, and what it does not
Grease trap cleaning, drain unblocking and pest control are each quoted for the job, from your description and photos or after a free inspection, before any work starts.
Cleaners are booked by the hour from our price list: one cleaner for three hours with our materials is AED 105, and two cleaners for four hours each is AED 280, VAT included. That is the basis of our kitchen cleaning visits, which work from the top down: hood exterior and removable filters, cabinet and appliance fronts, splashback, sink and taps, then the floor. Those visits were designed around home kitchens. For a commercial kitchen, describe the room and what you want done when you book, so that the scope and the hours are confirmed before anyone arrives. We have not published a restaurant cleaning programme, and we do not want you to assume one.
The front of house is simpler. A dining room, a back office and customer washrooms can be booked in the same way as the shops, clinics and offices on our office cleaning page: to an agreed checklist, before opening or after closing, within our working day of 8 AM – 8 PM. Say that it is a restaurant when you book. Keys and opening times are dealt with in how after-hours office visits work.
What to ask a restaurant cleaning company
A company that does this work properly answers these questions without hesitating. On the last one, our own trade licence number is CN-4175959, and how to check any company's licence is explained in how to choose a cleaning company in Abu Dhabi.
- Which of the jobs in the table do you carry out yourselves, and which do you pass to someone else?
- For the grease trap: do you remove the sludge as well as the floating grease, and do you clean the walls and baffles?
- Where does the trap waste go, and what record of each collection will we receive?
- Can you work in our quiet hours, and how long will the sinks or the line be out of use?
- What is your trade licence number, and which activities does it cover?
Grease, drains and pests
Cockroaches, drain flies and rodents live in the places a schedule tends to miss: under and behind fixed equipment, the floor-drain channels, the bin store and an unsealed trap lid. A treatment applied over grease does not last, which is why cockroaches return to a kitchen that has been sprayed.
Our pest control service inspects first and then treats the pest that is found. Treatment for a business can be scheduled outside working hours, and a kitchen under constant pressure may do better on a scheduled plan than on single visits. The public pest service in Abu Dhabi is for homes and not for businesses, as municipal or private pest control explains.
Booking a grease trap clean: what to tell us and what it costs
The quote and the time allowed both depend on the trap. The guide on how to get an accurate repair quote shows which photos help for any maintenance job. For a trap, send the details below, and before the visit clear stock from around the cover and keep a water point free for rinsing.
- Where the trap is: under a sink, in the kitchen floor, or in a chamber outside.
- Its size or capacity, from the label or the drawings, or its rough length, width and depth.
- When it was last emptied, and what you have noticed since: slow sinks, a smell, grease showing at a drain.
- The kitchen's quiet hours, and any building rule on access, parking or working times.
- Whether the trap is yours alone or shared with other tenants.
- A photo of the cover, and of the inside if staff can open it safely.
Cost and payment
We do not publish a price for grease trap cleaning. It is quoted by the size of the trap, how much grease and sludge has built up, the access, and whether a blockage or an odour needs priority attention. A trap on a regular schedule costs less per visit than one that has been left. The figure is agreed before work starts and includes VAT, with no call-out fee and no extra for a Friday or a public holiday.
Payment is online by card, from My bookings on this website once the price is confirmed. For a quoted job of AED 1,000 or more, 30% is paid in advance by that link and the balance after the work. We have not published a contract for trap cleaning. Each visit is quoted and booked on its own, and the next date can be fixed at the end of every one. When a contract is worth having is weighed up in annual maintenance contract or pay per visit.
Common questions
Does the kitchen have to close for a trap clean, and how long does it take?
It does not have to close. A standard trap on a regular schedule typically takes 30 to 60 minutes to service, and a neglected one takes longer. The sinks that drain to the trap cannot be used while it is open, and the work smells, so the visit belongs in the quiet hours: before prep starts, or between lunch and dinner. We work every day from 8 AM – 8 PM, and the visit is planned around your shifts.
We are in a mall and the landlord looks after the main interceptor. Do we still need a trap clean?
Often, yes. A unit in a mall, a food court or a tower podium may have its own trap under the pot-wash sink as well as the building's large shared interceptor further down the line. The landlord's contractor deals with the shared one. Whatever sits inside your unit is normally yours to maintain, unless your lease says otherwise. Ask the management which parts they maintain and how often, and keep the answer in your file.
Can our own staff empty the grease trap?
Staff can and should do the daily part: empty the sink strainers and the floor-drain baskets, and lift out the strainer basket of a small under-sink trap if the maker's instructions provide for it. The full clean is different. The contents have to be removed completely, the inside cleaned, and the waste taken somewhere permitted to receive it, with a record, and a large in-ground interceptor is a confined space holding gas from decomposing waste, which nobody should enter or lean into. That work belongs to a service that does it routinely.
The sinks are slow again a week after the trap was cleaned. Why?
There are three usual explanations. The trap is too small, or the kitchen too busy, for the interval being used. A baffle is missing or out of place, so grease crosses the tank without separating. Or the restriction was never in the trap: fat that passed through in earlier months has coated the pipe beyond the outlet. The first is solved by a shorter interval, the second by a repair, and the third by having the line cleared.
The kitchen smells of drains although everything looks clean. Where is it coming from?
Work through the hidden places in order. The trap may be overdue, or its lid may not be sealing. A floor drain that is rarely used may have lost its water seal, which a jug of water restores. The channel under a grating may be lined with slime although the basket is clean. Then look at the mop sink, the bin store and the floor under fixed equipment. The way a dried-out water seal lets sewer air into a room is the same as in a bathroom floor drain that smells.
How to book
Book on the website or in the IHR Dream app, describe the trap using the list above and attach photos. We confirm the scope, the time and the price before the visit, and plan it for the kitchen's quiet hours. You can cancel or move a booking free of charge up to 6 hours before the start time.
The grease trap cleaning page lists what the visit includes and the signs that a trap is overdue, and the areas we serve page shows where we work. When you are ready, book a visit.
