Two kitchens with the same seat count can need service months apart. Fryers, griddles and prep volume decide the rate, so the interval comes from readings taken at your trap rather than from a standard frequency.
The menu sets grease trap pumping rate, not the covers
A forty-cover fryer-heavy kitchen can fill a trap faster than a hundred-cover room working mostly off a grill. Set both on a quarterly schedule and one is paying for visits it does not need while the other is passing grease into the line between them.
Readings fix that. Fill depth measured at each visit gives an accumulation rate, and the rate gives a date. It also flags a change quickly, which is useful when a menu changes or a second service is added and nobody thinks to mention it to the waste contractor.
Trap size, location, access and your operating hours recorded, along with anything else on site that needs pumping.
Take a baseline
Fill depth measured on the first visit, which is the reading every later interval is calculated against.
Set and route the interval
A date derived from your accumulation rate, slotted into a route that sits outside your trading hours.
Record every visit
Fill reading, volume removed and disposal destination on a signed manifest, left on site and filed against the address.
What the readings are worth later
A fill history answers questions you cannot answer otherwise
A year of readings tells you whether a new menu has changed your grease load, whether a trap is undersized for the kitchen it serves, and whether a rise in line blockages lines up with anything at the trap. None of that is knowable from invoices alone.
It is also what an inspector wants to see, alongside the manifests: not just that the trap was serviced, but that it was serviced before it needed to be. That distinction is set out on grease trap compliance.
For operators with more than one site, the same readings roll up per address so the outliers are visible, which is the point of property management. Pricing by trap size is on grease trap cleaning cost.
First visit readingBaseline
From your rateInterval
Kept per addressHistory
Grease trap services
Other grease trap work
Cleaning, scheduled pumping and the paperwork behind both.
From fill depth measured at each visit. Two readings give an accumulation rate and the rate gives a date, which is far more accurate than a standard frequency applied to every kitchen.
You can, but by the time it looks full it has been passing grease for a while. The trigger is about a quarter of working depth, which is well before anything looks alarming.
The readings pick it up within a visit or two and the interval moves. Telling us in advance just makes it quicker.
The full contents, including the settled layer. Removing only the cap leaves the volume problem in place. See grease trap cleaning.
