If you are getting ready to open a commercial operation such as a restaurant, you need to pay particular attention to health and safety matters. While you will be focusing a lot on food preparation and storage, you also need to be sure that your utility systems are correctly configured. In particular, you need to make sure that you have an adequate amount of backflow prevention in place, especially as this is a condition imposed by licensing authorities in most cases. Here is further insight on backflow prevention and what you should know to keep your restaurant sanitary.

What Is Backflow Prevention?

Backflow prevention is meant to ensure that water flows in only the direction it was meant to and does not potentially contaminate your operation. Typically, freshwater will be pumped through pipes into your facility and drainage systems will ensure that wastewater goes out and into the public sewer. To enable everything to work as it should, pressure must be carefully balanced between the two systems.

What Can Go Wrong?

However, sometimes pressure will be higher in the sewer system than in the plumbing pipes and if not careful, sewage can be pushed back up and into the facility. This will, of course, lead to considerable contamination and is a danger to public health, especially in a restaurant. Should this happen, the entire system will need to be flushed out carefully and everything cleaned to very high standards and this will definitely be expensive and time-consuming.

What Do You Need?

A variety of different devices can be fitted to ensure that backflow is prevented, from one-way valves that automatically close when water tries to flow in a reverse direction, to "air" gaps that achieve the same objective.

What Is Considered Proper Regulation and Testing?

Whichever device you choose, it's very important that they are fitted properly and maintained carefully each year. It's likely that the jurisdiction within which you seek to operate will mandate their presence and furthermore, they will require that the devices be tested on a regular basis. This is something that a professional plumber needs to do, as the council will only accept a report from a certified expert like this.

Who Should Help?

Have a word with a commercial plumbing service to help ensure that you have the right type of backflow prevention in place for your operation, so that you have one less thing to worry about as you get ready to open for business.