The most useful thing a Bracknell kitchen keeps after a grease trap clean is a single sheet of paper. The Waste Transfer Note records what was taken out of the trap, when, by whom and under which registration, and it answers an environmental health officer, a Thames Water inspector or a landlord’s agent before the question is finished. TrueFlow Ltd issues one with every collection; its registration as an Upper Tier waste carrier, CBDU538687, is printed on it, and the engineer who did the work signs it on site.
That paper matters in Bracknell because the town’s biggest kitchens are not restaurants: they are the staff restaurants of the corporate campuses on Western Road and Cain Road and the banqueting kitchens of the conference hotels on the ring road. A staff restaurant serves most of its covers inside a single hour at midday; a hotel kitchen produces grease by the booking. The grease trap cleaning page describes the service everywhere; this is the Bracknell version.
Canteens that peak at one o’clock
A staff restaurant has a load curve unlike any high-street kitchen: little until mid-morning, a surge of plates, trays and pot wash concentrated into an hour, then nothing until the next day. The trap takes that surge as a single hot pulse of fat-laden water, which is the condition in which grease slips past a half-full unit. The emptying interval has to be set from how quickly that daily pulse fills the chamber, and the quiet hours either side of it are where the visit goes: before the kitchen opens, or once the afternoon is clear. Hotel kitchens run the other way, with breakfast every day and banqueting whenever a function is on, so their schedule follows the bookings.
What the engineer does on site
The visit is the standard clean from the service page, the unit emptied right down and scraped before it is refilled and the outlet proved, with photographs before and after and a note of anything found. If the outlet is slow, the pipework beyond the trap gets jetted in the same visit, at pressures up to 4000psi and from £150 including VAT, so the kitchen line is clean as well as the trap. The duty-of-care side, and the enforcement behind it, is covered in the kitchens and restaurants section and in the grease trap regulations guide.
Fitting the visit around a campus
Corporate sites and hotels have procedures a corner café does not: a loading bay to book, a security desk to sign in at, a permit to work. None of that is an obstacle once the trap has been seen: the unit’s size sets the time on site, and the time on site sets the booking. Early mornings, evenings and weekends are routine, since calls are taken at every hour of every day, and on a multi-building site several traps can be done on one attendance under one permit.
Pricing from a short inventory
The price follows the inventory: how many traps, what capacity, how often each needs emptying. An engineer draws that list up on a first visit that costs the site nothing, and the sum for the programme is fixed and written down before the first clean. A trap that overflows during a sitting is treated as an emergency, with attendance from £120 including VAT and a response target of 60 minutes. The engineers are insured and the work is guaranteed for six months. Gullies, yard drains and washroom stacks on the same site come under commercial drainage in Bracknell.
Bracknell grease trap FAQs
Can grease trap cleaning sit inside a wider facilities maintenance contract?
Yes. Trap emptying slots into a planned maintenance programme alongside jetting of kitchen stacks, yard gullies and washroom pipework, on one schedule with one set of reports and one invoice. The trap visits keep their own Waste Transfer Notes, since waste removed from a trap is documented separately from the rest of the work.
Does a staff restaurant that only serves weekday lunches still need a regular trap clean?
Yes, because fat builds up with every service and does not break down between them. A five-day lunch kitchen fills its trap more slowly than a seven-day restaurant, so the interval is longer, but a trap that is never emptied still reaches capacity and then stops separating.
Will the engineer need someone from the kitchen on site during the visit?
Only to provide access and to sign the Waste Transfer Note, which can be whoever holds the keys at that hour: a facilities contact, a security officer or the manager on shift. The kitchen team does not need to stop work or stand by, and on an early-morning or weekend visit the engineer works alone once let in.
The first note on file
To book a one-off clean, set up a programme or have a trap sized for one, phone 0808 175 7440 or send a survey request. Bracknell’s homes are on the Bracknell page.