New builds, remodels and takeovers. Sizing sanity-checks before the plan is final, a proper baseline pump-out on day one, and a compliance schedule from the first week rather than from the first backup.
Every commercial kitchen in Florida that produces fats, oils and grease is a food service establishment for regulatory purposes, and grease interception is not optional. That part most operators know. What catches people out is that the decisions which determine whether your grease programme is cheap and boring or expensive and stressful are all made before you serve a single cover.
Tank size, tank location, which fixtures get plumbed into the grease line, and how far the lid sits from anywhere a vacuum truck can park. Those four choices, made once during fit-out, set your service cost and your risk of a mid-service backup for the entire life of the tenancy. None of them are expensive to get right at plan stage. All of them are expensive to change afterwards.
We are not the plumbing engineer and we do not size to code, that is properly their job. What we can do is read a plan set and tell you, from having emptied a lot of tanks in this city, whether the proposed unit will actually survive the kitchen you are describing or whether you are going to be on a monthly route from month one.
A tenancy changes use. The unit was a sandwich shop, the tank was sized for a sandwich shop, and now it is a fried seafood house with a double fryer bank and a flat-top. The tank did not change. Nobody looked at it because the building already had one.
This is the single most frequent reason we meet a kitchen that is "serviced on schedule" and still backing up. The schedule was never the problem. The tank is a third of the size the operation needs.
Send us the plan set and the equipment schedule. We will look at the fixture load feeding the grease line, the cooking type, and the proposed unit, and tell you honestly whether the numbers look comfortable or tight. Tight is not automatically wrong, but you should know before it is poured rather than after.
The most overlooked item on any interceptor plan. A lid placed for the convenience of the slab pour, eighty feet from the nearest position a truck can legally occupy, adds cost to every single service for the next twenty years. Moving it on the drawing costs nothing.
A new tank should be commissioned full of clean water and should have a service date in the calendar before the first cover is served. Starting the record from day one is what makes the first inspection painless.
If you have bought or leased an operating restaurant in Cape Coral, treat the grease trap as an unknown until proven otherwise. The two questions worth answering in week one are what size it is and when it was last genuinely emptied, not last invoiced.
We do takeover inspections for exactly this. Lid off, contents read, size confirmed, baffle and tee condition checked, and a written picture of what you have actually inherited. If the previous operator was on a skim-and-invoice arrangement, that shows up immediately as a thin grease cap over a deep, compacted solids layer.
Sometimes the honest answer is that the first visit is a restoration rather than a routine pump-out and it will cost more than a standard service. We would rather tell you that up front and let you budget for it.
Florida requires grease waste to be tracked to a permitted receiving facility, and the manifest is the document that proves it. Inspectors generally want to see the last year of records. For a new kitchen that is easy, provided you start the folder on day one and actually keep it.
Every service we do leaves a signed manifest on site with the volume removed and the disposal destination recorded, and we hold a duplicate. The regulatory detail behind all of this is set out on our Lee County regulations guide, and the interval question is covered in the pumping frequency guide.
Full-service restaurants, pizzerias, bars and grills, waterfront seafood houses, cafes and bakeries, hotel kitchens, school and daycare kitchens, assisted living facilities, country clubs, commissaries and ghost kitchens. The smaller operations are the ones most likely to be running an undersized tank on an inherited schedule, which is precisely why they benefit most from someone looking at it properly once.
We work across the entire city and into neighbouring Lee County on route days. Full coverage is on the service area page, and price ranges are on the cost guide.
Before the health department will approve the kitchen for operation. Grease interception is a plumbing-permit item, so it gets designed in at plan stage, installed during the fit-out, and inspected as part of sign-off. Leaving it to the end is the classic new-operator mistake and it delays opening.
Sizing is driven by drainage fixture load, the fixtures actually connected to the grease line, and the cooking type. A pizzeria and a fried seafood house with the same seat count do not produce the same grease load. Your plumbing engineer sizes it formally against code; we can tell you from experience whether the number on the plan will survive contact with a real service schedule.
Find the trap, find out its size, and find out when it was last genuinely emptied. Then ask the previous operator for their service records. If there are none, or if the invoices are suspiciously cheap and frequent, assume the tank has not had a full evacuation in a long time and budget the first visit as a restoration rather than a routine pump-out.
The commissary kitchen does, because that is where the washing and the fixture load live. Mobile units themselves are handled differently and vary by arrangement. If you run a commissary serving multiple trucks, be aware the fixture load is usually higher than the original tenancy was sized for, which is a common reason for an undersized tank.
Yes. Multi-site operators are straightforward to route, and there is a real advantage in having one company reading all your tanks: we can tell you which site is the outlier and why, which is not obvious when three different contractors send three different invoices.
Send us the plan set, or just tell us what you have inherited. A sizing sanity-check before the slab is poured, or a takeover inspection in week one, is the cheapest grease decision you will ever make.
Prefer to write it out? Use the contact page and we will come back to you with a number.