Complete pump-outs for commercial kitchens across Cape Coral and Lee County. Every tank fully evacuated, walls and baffles scraped, inlet and outlet tees inspected, and a signed waste manifest left with you before we drive away.
The phrase "grease trap cleaning" covers two very different jobs in Cape Coral, and the gap between them is the single biggest reason kitchens end up with backups, odour complaints, and inspection problems despite having service invoices in the folder.
The first version is a skim. A technician lifts the lid, scoops or vacuums off the floating layer of congealed fats and oils, replaces the lid, and writes up a cleaning. It is quick, it is cheap, and it genuinely does remove the ugliest part of the contents. What it leaves behind is the entire liquid column and the layer of settled food solids on the tank floor, which in an older trap can account for a third of the total volume.
The second version is a full pump-out. Everything comes out: the grease cap, the water, and the sludge on the bottom. The interior walls get scraped, the baffle walls get cleaned and checked for cracks or displacement, the inlet and outlet tees get inspected, and the tank gets visually assessed before the lid goes back on. That is what restores the trap's designed retention volume, and it is the only version that actually resets your compliance clock.
We only do the second version. Not because we are purists, but because the first version creates a customer who calls us again in six weeks with a backed-up floor drain, which is a worse outcome for everyone involved.
Cape Coral sits on a low-lying, flat drainage profile with long service laterals in many of the commercial corridors. Del Prado Boulevard, Pine Island Road and the South Cape restaurant district all have plazas where the kitchen sits a considerable distance from the main. A long, shallow-fall lateral is unforgiving about carry-through: grease that escapes an overloaded trap has plenty of cool pipe wall to cling to before it reaches anywhere with real flow velocity.
The other factor is seasonality. A Cape Harbour waterfront restaurant in February and the same restaurant in August are effectively two different businesses. Covers can double or triple in season, which means the trap fills at a completely different rate for four or five months of the year. A fixed quarterly schedule set from a slow-season baseline will sail past the 25 percent threshold every winter without anyone noticing until the sink starts backing up.
We account for that by reading the trap on every visit and telling you what we saw. If your interval needs to tighten for the season and relax again afterwards, that is a conversation worth having, not a contract term to hide behind.
Florida's plumbing code sets the baseline service interval for a grease interception device at every 90 days. Separately, the device must be serviced whenever accumulated fats, oils, grease and solids reach 25 percent of the total liquid depth.
Whichever comes first, governs. A high-volume fryer kitchen on an undersized trap can cross 25 percent in five or six weeks, which means quarterly service alone leaves it non-compliant for most of the quarter. Our pumping frequency guide walks through how to work out which rule is driving your kitchen.
We ask three things: trap size, where the lid is, and roughly when it was last serviced. Those three answers determine the vacuum capacity and hose length we need to bring. Most of the "the truck came and could not do the job" stories we hear trace back to nobody asking those questions in advance. If you inherited the trap and genuinely do not know the size, say so. We will bring capacity for the worst case.
Before anything is removed we look at what is in there. The depth of the grease cap relative to the liquid column tells us how the trap has been loading, and whether the previous service interval was right. A thin cap with a deep sludge layer usually means a history of skimming. A uniform heavy cap usually means the interval is simply too long.
The entire contents are vacuumed into the truck. Not the cap, not the cap plus some water, all of it, down to the floor of the tank. On a neglected unit this may require agitation to break up compacted solids before they will move through the hose.
With the tank empty we scrape the interior walls and both faces of the baffle wall, which is where hardened grease builds the thickest. Then the inlet and outlet tees get checked. A missing or broken outlet tee is a surprisingly common find and it is serious: without it, the trap stops separating properly and grease carries straight through to the lateral regardless of how recently it was pumped.
The tank is refilled with clean water so it is working from the first dish washed after we leave. The lid gets reseated properly with the gasket seated, which is the difference between a sealed trap and a kitchen that smells of it. Then you get the manifest, signed, with the volume removed and the disposal destination recorded.
Florida tracks grease waste from the generating kitchen to a permitted receiving facility, and the manifest is the paperwork that proves the chain of custody. Under state rules the generator, meaning you, retains responsibility for waste that is improperly disposed of, which is why a hauler who cannot tell you where the load is going is a risk carried by your establishment number and not theirs.
Keep the manifests. Inspectors typically want to see the last year of service records, and a folder of signed manifests turns that part of the inspection into a thirty-second conversation. We leave a signed copy on site every visit and we keep a duplicate, so if your folder goes missing during a remodel we can reissue the history.
Under-sink units from roughly 20 to 100 gallons are the most common in the Cape, particularly in the smaller South Cape and Cape Harbour storefronts where the kitchen was fitted into an existing tenancy. These fill fast, which is why they usually need a shorter interval than the code baseline rather than a longer one.
Mid-size indoor units in the 100 to 500 gallon range typically serve larger full-service kitchens. Outdoor in-ground interceptors, commonly 500 to 2,000 gallons, serve the biggest operations and the newer builds on Pine Island Road and Veterans Parkway. Those are covered in detail on our grease interceptor cleaning page.
Small under-sink traps in Cape Coral generally run between $150 and $300 per service. Larger indoor units and small outdoor interceptors typically land in the $250 to $450 range. Full outdoor interceptors of 1,000 gallons and up are usually $400 to $800, driven mainly by volume, truck access, and how long it has been since the last proper evacuation. Emergency and after-hours work carries a premium.
Those are honest working ranges, not a bait figure. We quote off the actual trap and the actual site because the difference between a lid twelve feet from a parking space and a lid eighty feet across a plaza is real work. The full breakdown, including what drives a quote up and which cheap quotes to be suspicious of, is on our Cape Coral cost guide.
We cover the whole of Cape Coral: South Cape and downtown, Cape Harbour, the Pine Island Road corridor, Del Prado Boulevard, Santa Barbara Boulevard, Veterans Parkway, Surfside and the southwest Cape, Burnt Store Road, the north Cape, and the Yacht Club district. Neighbouring Lee County kitchens in Fort Myers, North Fort Myers, Estero and Bonita Springs are served on scheduled route days. The full list is on our service area page.
A small under-sink trap is usually 20 to 40 minutes from lid off to lid back on. A mid-size indoor unit runs closer to an hour. Outdoor interceptors depend almost entirely on volume and hose distance, but most fall between one and two hours. We schedule around your service windows, so for a lunch-and-dinner restaurant that usually means mid-afternoon or after close.
Not usually. The trap has to stop receiving flow while it is being evacuated, so the three-compartment sink and any connected fixtures go out of use for the duration. Everything else keeps running. For an outdoor interceptor the kitchen generally keeps operating normally throughout.
Expect a longer job and a harder one. The grease cap sets up firm, solids compact on the bottom, and the baffles are often fouled or damaged. We may need to hydro-agitate the contents to get them moving. We will tell you before we start if what we are looking at is a standard pump-out or a restoration, and we will quote it honestly rather than surprising you on the invoice.
Sometimes, and sometimes not. If the trap was overloaded and grease was carrying through into the outlet, emptying the trap stops the problem getting worse but does not remove the hardened grease already lining the line downstream. If the drain is still slow after a full pump-out, the line itself needs attention and we will say so rather than pretending the trap service solved it.
Yes. Most of our Cape Coral work comes from operators switching after a bad experience. Bring us your last two invoices if you have them. They usually tell us straight away whether you were getting full pump-outs or skims, and that shapes what we find on the first visit.
Tell us the trap size and roughly when it was last serviced and we will price the job before anything is scheduled. If you do not know the size, that is normal on a takeover and we will work it out on the first visit.
Prefer to write it out? Use the contact page and we will come back to you with a number.