Grease Trap Cleaning

One: the rule that binds you is local

Federal law prohibits introducing to a sewer solid or viscous pollutants in amounts which will cause obstruction resulting in interference. It sets no grease number. The enforceable figure is written by your control authority, because the same regulation requires each POTW to develop and enforce its own specific limits.

EPA’s own training examples run from 50 to 600 milligrams per liter. Why a single national figure does not exist.

Source: 40 CFR 403.5, National pretreatment standards: Prohibited discharges; U.S. EPA, FOG Management and Control Program.

Two: the device works by letting grease cool

Grease floats, solids settle, and the outlet reaches into the band between them. Everything else — the tees, the baffle, the sizing, the schedule — is in service of that.

Which is why a dish machine at 140 to 180 degrees turns a working trap into a length of pipe without changing anything you can see. The most common expensive mistake in a commercial kitchen.

Source: U.S. EPA, FOG Management and Control Program.

Three: a vessel can be on schedule and still failing

A missing inlet tee, a broken baffle, a disposal plumbed in, a vessel too small to stop short-circuiting or too large to stay aerobic. None of those are solved by pumping more often, and all of them are invisible from the lid.

The failures worth checking for, and why too big is a real problem too.

Four: the record is half the compliance

Manifests, service history and what an inspector actually looks at — including the manhole downstream of your connection, which does not care what your file says.

What to keep, and why the first letter is the one that costs least to answer.

The scale of the problem, in EPA’s figures

Source: U.S. EPA, Fats, Oils and Grease from food service establishments, EPA-833-F-12-003.

What we will not tell you

A grease limit, a pumping interval or a device size for your kitchen. The first is your ordinance, the second is usually your ordinance and always your loading, the third is a design calculation at plan review.

That refusal has its own page, along with the price and the compliance verdict we also decline to invent.

What the service is

We connect operators and property managers with independent contractors who cover their area, and the contractors pay us when we route them a call. You are never charged.

How that works in full, and where we route.

Everything published here

• The local rule
• Trap or interceptor
• How often
• What goes wrong
• The dishwasher problem
• Sizing
• Yellow and brown
• The paperwork
• What we cannot tell you
• Cost