Tagged with 'effluent'

I’m not fond of unsolved mysteries. When a service contractor stumped us with a problem in the late 1990s, the issue nagged at me.

The contractor told us about gelatinous masses building up in a handful of grease separators. The masses smelled terrible, he said, and the separators had surprisingly low water input flows.

We tried figuring out what the gel was. We ran tests in our lab. We looked online. We consulted wastewater treatment professionals and scientists. We couldn’t come up with anything.

Whenever I thought about the gel, I kept picturing the monster from the 1958 cinematic classic, The Blob.

Many local sewer ordinances require that food service establishments make their grease interceptors available for periodic inspection to ensure they’re working correctly, keeping fats, oil and grease (FOG) out of the wastewater system.

And the tool of choice for many pretreatment coordinators and other professionals is the dipstick (or popularly, the Sludge Judge, a specific brand of dipstick). It’s a long, clear plastic tube that enables anyone to quickly measure how much grease a grease interceptor has accumulated.

While dunking a dipstick into a grease interceptor may allow you to quickly determine whether or not it needs to be emptied, it doesn’t really tell you how well the interceptor is keeping grease out of the wastewater system.