Back in the early 2000s, most of us learned to wash dishes one way: crank the hot water, squirt some Dawn, and scrub everything until it squeaked. Hot water meant clean. That was just the rule. Nobody questioned it, and honestly, why would you? Hot water cuts through grime. It melts away sticky residue. It feels more sanitary. But somewhere along the way, plumbers started waving a red flag about one very specific scenario — greasy pots and pans. Turns out, that blast of hot water you’ve been using on your skillet after frying chicken or cooking bacon? It might be quietly wrecking your plumbing.
The pipe problem
Here’s what actually happens when hot water hits a greasy pan. The heat melts the fat — bacon grease, butter residue, olive oil, whatever — and turns it into a liquid that flows right down your drain. Sounds fine, right? The grease is gone from your pan, problem solved. Except it’s not gone. It’s just relocated. As that melted grease travels through your pipes and starts to cool, it re-solidifies. It coats the inside of your plumbing like a waxy layer, clinging to pipe walls and hardening there.
Over weeks and months, those thin layers stack up. Every time you wash another greasy pan with hot water, you’re adding to the buildup. Eventually, you get a narrowed pipe. Then a slow drain. Then, if you’re unlucky, a full-on blockage that requires a plumber and a bill that’ll make your eyes water. We’re talking hundreds of dollars, sometimes more, depending on where the clog forms and how stubborn it is.
And it’s not just your home pipes at risk. Fats, oils, and grease — plumbers call it FOG, which is kind of a perfect name for something you can’t really see happening — also cause problems downstream. City sewers deal with massive grease buildups that can affect entire neighborhoods. Wastewater treatment plants struggle with it too. So this isn’t just a “your house, your problem” situation. It ripples outward.
Cold water wins
So if hot water is the villain here, what’s the alternative? Cold water. I know — it sounds completely backward. We’ve been conditioned to think cold water is the lazy, ineffective option. But when it comes to grease, cold water does something really useful: it keeps the fat solid. Instead of melting into a liquid that coats your pipes, the grease stays chunky and firm. Those solid bits can actually move through the plumbing more easily because they don’t stick to the walls the same way.
Doyle James, the president of Mr. Rooter Plumbing, put it pretty simply in an interview about this topic. When fat, oil, and grease meet cold water, they solidify fast. Then gravity and water flow do the rest, pushing those solid pieces through and out. No coating. No buildup. No expensive emergency call to a plumber on a Saturday afternoon.
Now, does this mean you should be intentionally washing tons of grease down the drain as long as the water is cold? Absolutely not. Cold water is better than hot, but it’s still not ideal to send large amounts of grease into your plumbing at all. Think of cold water as damage control for the residual grease — the thin film left behind after you’ve already removed the bulk of it. Which brings us to the most important step most people skip entirely.
Wipe first, always
Before any water touches your greasy pan — hot or cold — you should be removing as much fat as possible by hand. This is the step that makes the biggest difference, and it takes about thirty seconds. Let the pan cool down first (hot grease is genuinely dangerous to handle, and splattering bacon fat on your hand is not a fun Tuesday evening). Once it’s cool enough to touch safely, grab a paper towel or some old newspaper and wipe out the grease.
For bigger amounts of grease — like what you’d have after frying chicken thighs or making carnitas — pour the excess into a container. A lot of people keep an old jar under the sink for exactly this purpose. An empty peanut butter jar works great. So does an old coffee can with a lid, or even a used yogurt container. Just pour the cooled grease in, let it harden, and toss the whole thing in the trash when it’s full. Some people save bacon grease for cooking (which, honestly, is a whole other article), but if you’re not into that, the trash is totally fine.
The key thing is getting that FOG out of the pan before it ever reaches your drain. You don’t need to be perfect about it. Just get the majority out. A quick wipe with a wadded-up paper towel removes a surprising amount of residue. Then when you do wash the pan, whatever thin layer is left is way more manageable for your plumbing to handle — especially with cold water.
Stubborn residue fixes
Okay, but what about the pans where wiping alone doesn’t cut it? You know the ones. That crusty ring of baked-on grease around the edges of a skillet. The sticky film on a roasting pan after you’ve made a sheet pan dinner. Regular dish soap and cold water might not be enough for those situations, and scrubbing harder isn’t always the answer — especially if you’ve got nonstick or ceramic cookware where aggressive scrubbing can damage the surface.
Baking soda is your best friend here. Sprinkle a tablespoon or two directly onto the greasy spots, then use a damp sponge to work it in. Baking soda acts as a mild abrasive — gritty enough to help lift grease but gentle enough not to scratch most surfaces. A box from the grocery store costs under a dollar, and it’ll last you months of pan-cleaning sessions. You can find it at literally any store — Walmart, Dollar Tree, wherever. Plenty of soap helps too, since the surfactants in dish soap are designed to keep grease suspended in water so it rinses away instead of reattaching to surfaces.
One thing to keep in mind: baking soda and aluminum pans don’t always play nice together. Aluminum can discolor or react with baking soda, leaving dark marks. If you’re dealing with an aluminum sheet pan or pot, stick with soap and a soft sponge. Ceramic pans are a bit delicate too — no steel wool, no harsh scrub brushes. Just the baking soda and a regular sponge will do the job without ruining the coating.
Cast iron is different
That brings up another thing people often wonder about — what about cast iron? Cast iron skillets have their own set of rules, and honestly, the whole “never use soap on cast iron” debate has been going on for decades. The short version: modern dish soap is fine in small amounts. It won’t destroy your seasoning. But the grease-handling process for cast iron is a little different because you actually want some of that oil to stay in the pan.
Cast iron seasoning is basically layers of polymerized oil baked onto the surface. That’s what gives it the nonstick quality and prevents rust. So when you cook something greasy in a cast iron skillet, you don’t want to strip all of that away. The usual approach is to wipe out the excess oil with a paper towel while the pan is still warm (not scorching hot — just warm), then use coarse salt and a little oil as a scrub if there’s stuck-on food. Rinse briefly, dry thoroughly, and maybe rub a thin layer of oil on before storing.
The cold water rule still applies if grease is going down the drain, but with cast iron, the goal is to minimize how much water you use in the first place. The less you wash, the better the seasoning holds up. It’s a different philosophy from how you’d treat a stainless steel pan or a nonstick skillet, but the underlying plumbing principle stays the same — don’t send liquid grease down your pipes.
Small habits, big savings
Along the same lines, it’s worth thinking about this from a pure dollars-and-cents perspective. A plumber visit for a grease clog averages somewhere between $150 and $400, depending on your area and how bad the blockage is. If the clog is deep in your main sewer line? That can run into the thousands. Meanwhile, a roll of paper towels costs a couple bucks. An old jar is free. Cold water comes out of the same faucet as hot water. The math is not complicated.
And garbage disposals aren’t a loophole here, either. A lot of people assume that if they have a disposal, they can send grease down the drain because it’ll get chopped up or something. That’s not how it works. Garbage disposals handle solid food scraps — potato peels, bits of lettuce, small bones. They do nothing for liquid fat. The grease just flows right past the blades and into your pipes, where it causes the same problems it would without a disposal.
So the whole routine boils down to this: let the pan cool, wipe or scrape out the grease, toss it in the trash or a container, then wash with cold water and soap. That’s it. Five minutes of slightly different habit saves you from a genuinely miserable and expensive plumbing disaster. The kind of thing that seems like it won’t happen to you — until it does, and you’re standing in your kitchen watching murky water back up into your sink on a holiday weekend. Just use cold water. Your pipes really will thank you.
