How to avoid a fatsicle in your drain

We have a word for the grey, greasy mass that builds up inside a kitchen drain over months of cooking. A fatsicle. It is not pretty, and it is the single most common cause of the blocked kitchen sinks we get called to. The good news is that avoiding one is genuinely easy.

The one rule that matters most

Do not pour fat or cooking oil down your drain. That is it. That is the rule that prevents most kitchen blockages. The trouble is that hot fat goes down as a liquid, so it feels harmless, and then it cools and hardens on the inside of the pipe. Each time you do it, the build up gets a little thicker, until one day the water has nowhere to go.

What to do with used fat instead

The simplest method we know costs nothing. Keep an old container, an empty tin or a takeaway tub, somewhere by the stove. When you have finished cooking, pour the cooled fat into the container. Once it is full, put the lid on and put it in the rubbish. That is the whole trick.

• Let the fat cool slightly so you are not handling boiling oil.
• Pour it into an old tin or tub, not the sink.
• Wipe greasy pans with a paper towel before washing, so less grease reaches the drain in the first place.
• Once the container is full, seal it and bin it.

What about hot water and detergent?

People often believe that running hot water and a squirt of dish soap will carry the fat away. It helps a little in the moment, but the fat tends to travel a short distance down the pipe, cool, and settle there anyway. It is better than cold water, but it is not a substitute for keeping the fat out of the drain to begin with.

If your kitchen drain is already slow

A kettle of hot, not boiling, water can soften a light grease build up and get things moving again. A plunger can shift a bit more. We cover the safe home steps in detail in our guide on what to try before you call a plumber. If it keeps slowing down no matter what you do, the grease layer is probably well established.

It is not just fat that causes trouble

Fat is the worst offender, but it has accomplices. Coffee grounds clump together and do not break down. Flour and starchy water from pasta or potatoes turn to a paste. Tea leaves, eggshells and the stringy ends of vegetables all snag on any roughness inside the pipe and give the grease something to cling to. On their own most of these would flush through, but combined with even a thin film of fat they build a blockage faster than you would think.

A sink strainer, the little basket that sits in the plughole, catches most of this for a few dollars. Empty it into the bin rather than pushing the contents down the drain, and you remove most of what would otherwise feed a fatsicle.

Why grease is so much worse in winter

Wellington gets cold, and cold pipes make the problem worse. Fat that might have travelled a little way down a warm pipe in summer hardens almost immediately in a cold one in July. If your kitchen drain only seems to slow down in the colder months, grease is almost certainly the reason. The fix is the same all year round, keep it out of the drain, but winter is when a borderline drain finally gives up.

It is also when we are busiest with blocked drains, so a slow kitchen sink in the middle of winter is worth dealing with before it becomes a fully blocked one on a night you would rather not be mopping the floor.

When to call us

For a stubborn grease blockage, the proper fix is a hydro jet, which blasts the inside of the pipe clean with high pressure water in a way that no kettle or plunger can match. It is one of the tools we carry for exactly this. You can read how we approach blockages on our drainage and drainlaying page, or just call 027 247 3030 and we will sort it.

Prevention really is easier than cure here. An old tin by the stove will save you a call out. But if the fatsicle has already won, we are around any hour to clear it and get your kitchen working again.