Tagged with 'grease separators'

Testing your assumptions is always good as a pretreatment professional because so many variables impact your job. New technology and data can compel you to change some of your longest-held beliefs. 

Is it possible to assume there are universally held “technical understandings” that solve nearly all fats/oils/grease issues?  Are there other universally held “technical understandings” that are expected to solve TSS, BOD, pH, and other pretreatment/collection system issues?  How did these “universally held technical understandings” come about and why are they still the tail that wags the proverbial dog?

This post questions a few of these universally long-held “technical understandings.”

I’m not fond of unsolved mysteries. When a service contractor stumped us with a problem in the late 1990s, the issue nagged at me.

The contractor told us about gelatinous masses building up in a handful of grease separators. The masses smelled terrible, he said, and the separators had surprisingly low water input flows.

We tried figuring out what the gel was. We ran tests in our lab. We looked online. We consulted wastewater treatment professionals and scientists. We couldn’t come up with anything.

Whenever I thought about the gel, I kept picturing the monster from the 1958 cinematic classic, The Blob.