Grease traps
Grease building in kitchen and deli drain lines fast enough to generate a steady run of blockages and emergency call-outs.
fewer blockage incidents in the second year
01The plant
Floor drains and grease-trap lines in the food preparation areas of a supermarket chain running more than two hundred stores across the Northeast and Midwest. One store was the trial site.
02Before
Grease from the rotisserie and fryer station, the deli preparation area and the butcher's shop was building in the drains faster than the flow could carry it away. The trial store was running eighteen to twenty-five blockages a year, and about six thousand dollars of plumbing with them.
03Treatment
A biological drain treatment metered into the worst drains overnight by automatic doser. The butcher's drain sat in the middle of an open floor and would take no doser, so it was dosed by hand every few days instead.
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
Per drain and per night, set against what each station puts down its own line — the fryer and rotisserie drain took a different quantity from the deli counter. A quantity for one drain is not a quantity for the next one along, which is why they were sized separately.
05Method
Blockage incidents counted and the plumbing spend against them, over two years, against a documented pre-treatment baseline at the same store.
06Outcome
The programme was extended to further stores on the strength of it. The chain's own projection across all its locations is a saving approaching $872,000–900,000 after product cost, which is an estimate rather than an outcome.
At the start
Eighteen to twenty-five drain blockages a year at the trial store, at roughly six thousand dollars a year in plumbing.
At the close
Seven incidents in the first year, and one in the second.
07Limits
Counting call-outs is not measuring grease. Nothing was weighed, sampled or analysed at either end, so what the drains actually held is not established — only how often somebody had to come out to them. One store, no untreated store beside it, and two years across which staffing, menu and cleaning practice could all have moved without being recorded. The chain-wide saving is a projection from a single site and should be read as 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
SediLogic Liquid FOG is the article in the range built for this — a liquid concentrate aimed at fats, oils and grease and dosed into the collection system rather than at a lagoon blanket. A trap takes a metered or poured dose; a sinking solid has nothing to sink to.
SediLogic holds a written dose table for wastewater lagoons and for no other duty, so the planner will not size a trap and we will not guess at one. Tell us the trap, the flow and what it is loaded with, and a quantity is settled with a person.
—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
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.
Grease traps
Industrial300 days
reduction in BOD and suspended solids in the trap
A trap whose contents were strong enough that every pump-out was charged as high-strength waste.
Your lagoon next
A different plant, a different loading and a different sludge. What decides your result is how much of your own accumulation is organic and treatable, and whether the dose is sized against the lagoon in front of us rather than read off this page. Tell us the dimensions and we will size it.
