Grease traps
A kitchen waste line hardening with grease and blocking two or three times a week, with pipe replacement the quoted alternative.
to clear the hardened grease and restore flow
01The plant
The kitchen waste line of a high-volume restaurant in a Jakarta shopping mall, running to the mall's central food-court grease trap.
02Before
Hardened fats, oils and grease had built along the line until the pipe was nearly closed, leaving a small opening for the flow. It backed up two or three times a week and flooded the kitchen. Crews were dismantling and scraping the pipes by hand every four months, one section had already been replaced outright, and manual cleaning never held because the hard grease re-formed within days.
03Treatment
A grease-digesting blend dosed into the kitchen's grease trap and at a distressed access point on the line itself, then kept running across a two-week window. The strains are selected for lipase activity and for working in the low-pH, high-grease conditions inside a packed line, so deposits are digested where they are rather than pushed downstream to block something else.
Every result in this library was measured at an operating plant treating with one of the formulations SediLogic supplies, over the window stated above. It is a field result published as reported, not a controlled trial we ran.
04Sizing
Two points rather than one — the trap, and the pipe access nearest the problem. Where a line is dosed matters as much as anything else about it, because a blockage clears from the dosing point outwards.
05Comparison
One leg of the system was left on manual cleaning only while the second stayed on the biological programme, and the two were compared side by side. Inside two weeks the treated leg was clearly ahead. It is not a true untreated control — the comparator was still being cleaned by hand, which is a treatment of a sort — but hand cleaning is the incumbent practice, and that is the comparison an operator is actually choosing between.
06Outcome
Flow restored without a second pipe replacement and the weekly backups stopped. The restaurant moved off reactive scraping and onto a steady preventive dose.
07Limits
Nothing was measured. The record is photographs of access points through the run, plus the fact that the line was open when it was next serviced — no grease mass, no flow rate, no before-and-after figure of any kind. Fourteen days is when somebody happened to open the pipe on a routine service, not a measured endpoint. A restaurant waste line is not a lagoon and nothing about the timescale here transfers to one.
Only the volatile organic fraction of a sludge responds to any of this. Grit, sand, silt, mineral precipitates and plastics remain at any dose, here and everywhere else.
—What we would supply
Liquid FOG is intended for fats, oils and grease in collection systems, including traps. These applications use liquid dosing and need their own instructions.
The planner does not calculate grease-trap quantities. Send the trap details, flow and loading for review. A lagoon dose table cannot be applied to a trap.
—Read next
Grease traps
IndustrialOngoing, first results in weeks
reduction in fats, oils and grease
Three restaurant kitchens sharing interceptors that were filling faster than the pump-out schedule could keep up with, with grease backing up into sinks between visits.
Grease traps
Industrial2 years
fewer blockage incidents in the second year
Grease building in kitchen and deli drain lines fast enough to generate a steady run of blockages and emergency call-outs.
Grease traps
IndustrialNot published
less oil accumulation in the trap
Oil accumulating in the trap faster than the cleaning contract allowed for, and taking a long time to clear at each visit.
Your lagoon next
This result came from a different plant. Your sludge composition and operating conditions need their own assessment. Send us your lagoon details for a dosing review; do not use the quantity on this page as your application rate.
