Municipal FOG Compliance Inspections
Cities limit how much fat, oil, and grease a restaurant may send to the sewer. An inspection looks for a trap that is still doing its job: a maintained box, pumping records, and an outlet that is not packed with grease.
Grease.org does not file city paperwork. The service we describe is the work inspectors expect to see: pumping, cleaning, and repair of the trap.
A maintained trap has a pumping record and an outlet that is not packed with grease. Grease.org does the pumping, the cleaning, and the repair. The city keeps the inspection form. We do not file that paperwork.
What the inspector is looking at
A municipal fats, oils, and grease inspection is a look at whether the kitchen's interceptor is the right kind, whether it is being emptied before it fails, and whether the records exist. The inspector is not there to sell a chemical and not there to operate the pump truck. GREASE.ORG does the pumping and the repair. The city keeps the enforcement. Confusing those roles is how a kitchen gets a citation while holding a receipt for the wrong service.
Expect the lid to come off. The inspector, or the city's contractor, measures the floating cap and the sludge layer. A common trigger is the twenty-five percent rule: when those two layers together reach about a quarter of the working depth, the trap is due, even if the calendar says you have another month. They look at the outlet tee or baffle. They look for a food grinder or a dishwasher tied in where the code forbids it. They look for fryer oil poured to a floor sink, which shows up as a trap that refills impossibly fast.
The paper is half the visit. Manifests should name the date, the volume, the hauler, and the destination. A gap is treated as a missed pump-out. Probiotic invoices do not fill the gap. A receipt for used-cooking-oil pickup does not fill it either, because that pickup is a different tank. Bring both files and do not staple them together as if they were one program.
If the inspection fails, the fix is physical. Pump the box, repair the broken tee, resize a unit that the menu has outgrown, or move a fixture that was tied in illegally. Schedule that work before the re-inspection date, and put the new manifest on top of the file. The city is checking a device and a habit. The habit is an interval short enough that the cap never reaches the outlet.