The Importance of Monitoring FOG (Fats, Oils & Grease)

The Importance of Monitoring FOG (Fats, Oils & Grease)

Published June 27, 2022
Brian Gannon, Director of Sales, Aquametrix by Water Analytics

Industry professionals, especially those involved in developing municipal compliance programs, understand the importance of measurement and monitoring to ensure best practices and preventive measures within your municipalities water system. This is especially true with municipal FOG (fats, oils & grease) programs, where it has become overwhelmingly evident that without proper compliance and measurement techniques, there is no control. This whitepaper has been designed for industry professionals to understand the importance of grease trap monitoring.

Municipalities throughout the United States, as directed by the US EPA under the Clean Water Act and Pretreatment Program regulations at 40 CFR 403.5(b)(3), have adopted FOG ordinances to mitigate the challenges associates with fats, oils and grease and reduce sanitary sewer overflows (SSO’s). These SSO’s are often direct results of fats, oils, and grease blockages in wastewater collection systems and while cost and rehabilitation of SSO’s vary from community to community, costs are highest in communities that have less enforcement and compliance in relation to FOG.

Preventing SSO’s and protecting our wastewater collection systems is a group effort that requires a complete solution:

• FOG Program Managers: must ensure their programs are up to date, comply with EPA standards and recommendations, and are effective & operational across all FSE’s
• Food Service Establishments: must ensure the correct trap is specified for their needs, installation is performed properly, and proper maintenance/compliance to their municipalities SOP’s is performed
• Municipal Inspectors: Must ensure traps are monitored and in compliance
• Pumpers/Haulers: must ensure proper removal of FOG from FSE according to municipality SOP’s, transportation, and proper disposal of FOG at local WWTP

Now that we have an overview of the importance of FOG monitoring to prevent SSO’s and the key parties involved in ensuring FOG programs are properly managed, lets outline the current monitoring methods. Many FOG programs call out what is known as the ‘25% rule’. This means a grease trap must be cleaned by a pumper/hauler before the grease trap exceeds 25% of its capacity in FOG. However, common measurement practices are often very manual due to the aggressive properties of FOG. Many municipal inspectors utilize core samplers, either a “Sludge Judge” or “Dipstick Pro” to remove a sample from the grease trap, visually review the sample, and them dump the sample. While effective, this is a messy process, often requires assembly and disassembly, and does not provide any advanced features to improve the quality and/or time of the inspection.

New, feature rich technologies have recently been introduced into the industry, each carrying their own pros and cons. While providing advanced interfaces and features, these technologies are primarily designed to be fixed within an individual grease trap and therefore limits are put on its use for a municipal inspector or pumper/hauler that goes to several FSE’s each day or week. Forthcoming instruments, such as Aquametrix AM-FOG Portable probe, blend these two monitoring devices, resulting in a digital core sampler, that rather than sampling, senses the surrounding fluids within the grease trap and provides a visual interpretation of the level of FOG via Bluetooth to Android or iOS. This data is then easily exported via email or text, providing a visual graph of the FSE’s grease trap at the time of inspection, GPS coordinates, and user-defined annotations.

As technology continues to develop within grease trap monitoring, municipalities are improving their guidelines to better improve FOG programs. Miami Dade, located in Florida, recently specified “the use of monitoring devices, with alarms and sensors is a recommended practice as a means to properly manage the level of floating and settled solids”. The development of technologies within the FOG industry, along with the ability to connect FOG program managers, FSE’s, Municipal Inspectors, and Pumper/Haulers to these technologies, is imperative to better control Fats, Oils, and Grease and improve our wastewater collection systems.

For more information about Aquametrix products, including the AM-FOG Portable Probe, please contact Brian Gannon at bgannon@wateranalytics.net