That old grease trap under the deli counter took me 8 hours to clean

I got a call about a backed up floor drain at a sandwich shop downtown. Figured it was a simple snake job, maybe an hour tops. But when I pulled the grate I found a grease trap that hadn't been touched in years, caked solid with black sludge. Ended up having to hand scoop 5 gallons of gunk out before I could even get a hydro-jet in there. Has anyone else run into a grease trap that was completely abandoned by previous maintenance crews?

2 comments

2 Comments

james921mo ago

You're not kidding, I had a similar nightmare once but with a fryer vat at an old diner. The previous guy had just been dumping grease down the sink for years instead of taking it out back. It was like scraping out a decades old candle, took me half a day just to get the first layer off.

miller.jason1mo agoMost Upvoted

Have you ever heard of a guy who let a grease trap overflow for like, six months straight? My buddy worked at a pizza place where the previous employee just kept dumping oil down the sink and eventually it backed up into the basement, flooded the whole floor with slimy water. Took a whole crew and a pressure washer three days to fix it, plus the landlord had to replace half the floorboards lol.