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GREASE TRAP TECHNOLOGY has remained virtually unchanged since the first patent was issued to Nathaniel Whiting in 1884. It wouldn’t be until many years later that standards would be adopted to regulate grease traps’ performance by the Drainage Manufacturers Association, an organization now known as the Plumbing and Drainage Institute.
The chances you or I will see a restaurant owner initiate a weekly or daily cleaning? When pigs fly! By the time he calls to have his grease trap cleaned, an evacuation of a 10-mile perimeter is warranted. If not, the neighbors will be calling the local coroner’s office to report the stench. Cleaning stagnant or poorly maintained grease traps separates the men from the boys and is a rite of passage no apprentice can escape.
Many others have been worthy of mention. If you could package their contents with odor intact, there wouldn’t be a need for any other form of chemical warfare! A synagogue had served a vat of uneaten onion soup to its grease trap and then called several weeks later to report an odor that couldn’t be traced to its origin. I swear the vapors were green as they wafted out of that sealed pit once I pried off the lid. The office personnel left the building within minutes as the odors found their way into the corridor, through several closed doors and into their office area. A local mall had a parking lot grease tank of several thousand-gallon capacity designed so poorly that all the FOGs were separated and then directed to the outlet! The mall had several hundred feet of clogged drainage lines and a food court dumping copious amounts of water while the lower level stores lost thousands of dollars from merchandise damaged by the backed-up drains.
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Its literature includes several methods for properly sizing grease traps and clearly spells out how these devices must be sized, installed and maintained. The standards call for cleaning on a regular basis in order to have this separator of fat, oil and grease (FOG) remain effective. In most cases, that time period is one week or less!
I can take you back to the first grease trap I was ever assigned to clean. It was in an Asian restaurant and the trap was roughly the size of a large loaf of bread. The trap was undersized, and the effluent had long since carried all FOGs through; the drains were completely clogged too. Prying off the lid revealed a cockroach condominium, and an odor escaped that was so foul it twisted my stomach in knots.
