A kitchen produces the hardest load any septic system will see. Trap, tank and lines are one connected problem, and servicing them on separate schedules from separate contractors is how sites get into trouble.
Restaurant septic service is decided by what the trap passes
Grease that stays in the trap is a scheduled pump-out. Grease that gets past it lines the run, reaches the tank, floats there, and on a worn outlet tee leaves for the bed, where it does permanent damage. One component's interval determines the fate of everything after it.
So the schedule is built from measured trap fill, under grease trap pumping, and the tank's interval is set from its own readings alongside. The outlet tee on a restaurant tank matters more than on any house.
Line blockages under a working kitchen are the expensive failure, because the repair is in the worst possible place. That is what blockage clearing handles, and what a correct trap interval largely prevents.
Kitchen site
How it works
How a kitchen site is scheduled
Survey everything
Trap, tank, lines, any wet well, access points and your trading hours, all recorded in one place.
Baseline readings
Trap fill and tank depths measured, which is what makes both intervals defensible rather than arbitrary.
Slot it out of hours
Early morning, after close or a dark day. Nothing is opened while covers are going out, ever.
Manifest and file
Signed manifest left on site each visit, copy filed against the address, ready for whoever asks.
What an inspection will ask for
The records, not the state of the trap
A kitchen inspection is largely a documents exercise. What is wanted is dated evidence of consistent service at an interval short enough that the trap was working between visits, in manifests that name who did the work and where the waste went.
Invoices are weak evidence for that, which surprises operators who have been paying somebody for years. The full requirement is set out on grease trap compliance.
For groups running several sites, the history rolls up per address so outliers are visible before they become incidents, under property management. Pricing by trap size is on grease trap cleaning cost.
Yes, and it should be. Trap, tank and any wet well on one route means one contact, one set of records and no component quietly missed because it belonged to a different contractor.
No. Early morning, after close or a dark day. Tell us your hours at survey and the route is built around them.
More often than a house of the same size, because the load is heavier and less predictable. The interval comes from measured depths rather than a standard frequency.
Usually, either because the interval is too long or because the service has been a skim rather than a clean. See grease trap cleaning.
It raises the stakes considerably. Grease reaching a septic bed destroys it, and a bed replacement at a commercial site is a large bill and a long closure.
Yes, with per-site records and one point of contact. See property management.
A restaurant tank fills faster than any house, and they were the first to explain why and set a schedule that matched our covers instead of a calendar.
Jill F.
Saanich
★★★★★
Pumped before opening at 6 a.m. so the dining room never smelled of it. The manifest was in my inbox before the lunch rush.
Nina G.
Victoria
★★★★★
They found our grease trap was passing fat into the septic tank and fixed the trap schedule first. Tank pumping dropped from monthly to quarterly.
Tara V.
View Royal
★★★★★
Health inspector asked for pumping records and I handed over their tickets. Dates, gallons, hauler licence, all on one page.
