Pricing a Pump-Out

No price is quoted here

InterceptorCall routes calls to independent contractors who set their own prices. Any figure we printed would be invented, and on a job that runs from a small trap serviced under a sink to a vacuum truck emptying several thousand gallons and hauling it to a permitted facility, an invented range would mislead more than it helped.

What actually moves it

The device: type, capacity, and how much is actually in it. Access: where the vessel is, whether a truck can reach it, and whether it is under something. Volume removed and disposal, which is a real cost at a real facility rather than a line item.

Then timing. Out of hours, same week and emergency are three different prices for the same work.

The question worth more than the price

What was found. A contractor who tells you the depth of each layer, the state of the tees and baffle and whether anything looks wrong upstream is giving you the information that decides your next twelve months. One who empties it and leaves has sold you a truck.

Ask for it before the work, so it is part of what you are buying rather than a favor afterwards.

Where the money is actually lost

Not on the per-service price. It is lost on a device that is passing grease and being pumped anyway, on an interval that is wrong in either direction, and on an enforcement file that starts with a letter and escalates through a schedule of compliance to a penalty.

The failures that make a correct schedule pointless, and the records that keep a first letter from becoming a third.

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

And the free part

Scraping and dry-wiping before washing, and keeping fryer oil in its own collection. It is the only control that reduces the load rather than catching it, it costs nothing but habit, and it is the first thing an inspector asks about.

• Yellow and brown
• How often
• What we cannot tell you