Thanks Mark & MrAlan, good points. I'm going down to the Turlock wastwater treatment plant today and talk informally with someone there. I'm interested in their input regarding my kitchen exhaust wastewater, and also any possibilities for service station island wastewater. I know they're very different but I think I'd like to understand and be able to work with both types of wastewater. I'll let everyone know what they tell me.

I just got back from our county water treatment plant and our city municipal services, with answers for grease and SH.

They want us to keep grease out of the water treatment plant because the water treatment plant needs to get oxygen into the sewage water to help clarify it. With grease floating on top of the waste water, it makes it hard for air to get down in the water and the water treatment doesn't work as well. The restaurants have grease traps to solve the grease problem. The guy I spoke with said the smaller older restaurants that don't have grease traps should hopefully have less grease than the larger more modern ones. All in all, the idea was that a little grease isn't a catastophe but alot of grease can cause problems. Aside from the water treatment plant issue, too much grease can clog the sewer lines on the way to the treatment plant.

For the SH, it's not a problem at all as long as we test it for neutral PH. The dairies out here dump millions of gallons of water/SH that they use for daily cleaning of cheese making machines and such. They have enormous tanks that are used to neutralize the used washwater before it goes into the sanitary sewer (waste/sewage treatment plant that is). He said that the few hundred gallons of SH waste we create are not a problem once it gets mixed with the rest of the vast sewage water if it travels 2 miles to the treatment plant BUT it's no good for the sewage system to experience a slug of caustic water traveling all at once through the system that may meet up with incompatible water from some other place. That's why they need us to neutralize it before we dump it in.

NOTE: the above just applies to kitchen waste water... The rules are MORE STRICT for the roof water that's headed for the storm drain. Storm drains are off limits around here for anything. Not even dusty fresh water is really welcome in the storm sewer, gutters, roof drains. Ideally, we'll capture the roof water and get it in the kitchen drain for the grease trap to deal with.

Chris Balcom
Vent Hood Steam Clean
Hughson, Ca.
(209) 620-2031