Trusted public works partner for cities, utilities, and municipal agencies across Oregon and Washington. Reliable, compliant, and fully documented infrastructure solutions.
Always available, day or night
Portland's trusted contractor
Oregon Licensed & Insured
Skilled, certified field team
1-year workmanship warranty
Discreet, professional infrastructure services built around the schedules and standards of hotels and food service operators.
Commercial kitchen grease trap jetting, repair, and FOG compliance documentation, fully managed for your facility.
Commercial kitchen drain cleaning, restroom drain service, and high-pressure hydro jetting for hotels and food service facilities.
24/7 emergency plumbing, water heater service, fixture installation, and sewer line repair for hotels and hospitality campuses.
Annual certified backflow preventer testing and compliance reporting, completely handled to keep your property current with Portland requirements.
“Lonnie and his partner cleaned out 28 downspouts over 2 days and didn’t leave a mess. He checked in before leaving to make sure we had no questions. His customer service was so impressive I requested 2 more quotes before he left.”
GM, Best Western Inn at the Meadows
Years in Business
Discreet After-Hours Work
24/7 Emergency
CCB Licensed
Restaurants and hotels face infrastructure demands that typical commercial properties never encounter. Understanding what can go wrong is the first step to preventing it.
Portland's Cut Through the FOG program, administered by BES under City Code 17.34 — requires food service establishments to maintain grease interceptors serviced before reaching 25% capacity, with cleaning reports filed within 14 days of each service. Violations and FOG bypass into the city sewer trigger citations and liability for downstream damage. Chemical or enzyme additives are explicitly prohibited and void compliance status.
Hotels average 45+ gallons per occupied room per day. Between 6–9am, 60–80% of rooms run showers simultaneously: a 100-room property may need 600–800 gallons per hour at temperature. Undersized or aging systems fail precisely at that peak moment. Lovett sizes commercial water heating systems around actual occupancy patterns and kitchen load, not rule-of-thumb code estimates.
Sewage backup in a prep area is grounds for an immediate stop-sale order under OAR 333-150, and a single closure day costs $2,000–$5,000 in missed revenue. Emergency drain repair costs 3–5× more than scheduled maintenance. Lovett's 24/7 response team can clear most restaurant drain emergencies with hydro jetting via cleanout access before your morning prep crew arrives.
Every step is built to protect your guest experience, satisfy Oregon regulatory requirements, and leave zero visible evidence of the work.
We schedule initial assessments during off-peak hours: late evenings, pre-open mornings, or between service periods, to evaluate your drain lines, grease interceptors, water heating infrastructure, and backflow prevention without interrupting service. Our technicians arrive in marked vehicles and work quietly. We document current conditions with photos and video inspection footage so you have a baseline record for insurance and compliance purposes.
Before any work begins, we confirm what Portland BES, Oregon BCD (Oregon Administrative Rules 918-780), and Multnomah County Environmental Health require for your specific project. Plumbing alterations in commercial buildings require licensed journeyman plumbers and often a plumbing permit with plan review. We handle all permitting and coordinate directly with Portland BES if your grease interceptor needs to be upgraded, relocated, or replaced, including the required maintenance reporting schedule going forward.
We coordinate every project window around your operation. For hotels, we schedule noisy or disruptive work during low-occupancy periods, typically Sunday through Thursday nights, and sequence room-by-room when water needs to be shut off so unaffected guests are never impacted. For restaurants, drain cleaning, interceptor service, and water heater replacements are scheduled after the last table turns or before the first prep shift. If your property requires consecutive-night work, we provide written schedules your front desk and kitchen managers can share with staff.
Every project closes with a documentation package: Oregon plumbing inspection sign-off, Portland BES grease interceptor cleaning reports (filed within the required 14-day window), backflow test certificates for Portland Water Bureau, and Lovett's internal workmanship warranty. For properties with multiple compliance obligations, we provide a consolidated compliance calendar: your interceptor next-service date, backflow annual test reminder, and permit closeout documents, so nothing slips between inspections.
Answers to the questions Portland hotels and restaurants ask us most.
Portland BES does not set a universal cleaning schedule: it assigns a frequency to each establishment individually based on kitchen type, interceptor capacity, and discharge volume. That said, the practical trigger is when your interceptor reaches 25% full of FOG and solids. For a high-volume restaurant or hotel kitchen, that can happen every 4–8 weeks. Lower-volume operations may go 2–3 months between cleanings. After every pump-out, you’re required to file a cleaning report with BES within 14 days. Lovett can manage that reporting on your behalf and set up a proactive maintenance schedule so you’re never approaching your threshold unaware.
BES can issue a formal citation for any deficiency identified during inspection: a damaged interceptor, missed cleaning reports, an overloaded unit, or evidence of FOG bypass into the city sewer. If your interceptor causes a sewer obstruction downstream, you may be held liable for damages to neighboring properties as well. Beyond the BES citation, a sewer backup in your kitchen can trigger a stop-sale order from Multnomah County Environmental Health under Oregon Food Sanitation Rules, meaning an immediate closure until the issue is corrected and re-inspected. Using chemical or enzyme additives to “treat” the grease instead of physically pumping it out also violates Portland City Code 17.34 and forfeits your eligibility for the Extra Strength Charge rate reduction. If you’ve received a notice of deficiency, call us. We can assess and correct the issue before it escalates.
Yes, that’s exactly the scenario we’re built for. Lovett operates 24/7 with fully equipped hydro jetting trucks and vacuum equipment staged across the Portland metro. For a typical grease-blocked kitchen drain line, our crew can arrive within an hour, set up outside your kitchen, run the jetting hose through a cleanout, clear the blockage at 2,000–4,000 PSI, and have the line flowing again in under two hours, without entering your food prep area if a cleanout access point exists. If the issue is a mainline blockage under the slab, we’ll scope the line, identify the exact location, and give you a clear plan. We do not create additional disruption, leave without a solution, or require you to wait until morning.
Portland BES requires either a hydromechanical interceptor (typically 20–50 gallons-per-minute capacity, sized per the number of drainage fixture units connected) or a large-capacity gravity interceptor (1,000–4,000-gallon buried tanks) for higher-volume operations. The correct size depends on how many kitchen fixtures discharge to it: sinks, floor drains, dishwasher pre-rinse stations, floor sinks, and your estimated daily flow rate. Getting it wrong in either direction is a problem: an undersized unit fills too quickly and leads to bypass violations; an oversized unit can develop septic conditions. Portland BDS reviews interceptor sizing during plan review for new construction and tenant improvements. Lovett can complete a load calculation, specify the correct unit, and handle the BDS submittal from start to permitted installation.
Coordination starts with your front desk and housekeeping managers, not our schedule. Before we mobilize for any non-emergency project, we get a copy of your occupancy forecast and block out work windows around your highest-demand nights. For work that requires isolating a water riser, which temporarily affects a vertical section of rooms. We target weeknight windows when those room types are least occupied, limit the water-off window to under two hours, and provide written notice to your team the day before. We do not use lobby entrances, don’t leave equipment in guest corridors overnight, and we clean up to hotel standard before we leave. For emergency response, your night manager gets a direct line to our technician on site.
Under Oregon Administrative Rules 918-780, a plumbing permit is required for virtually all plumbing installations, alterations, and replacements in commercial buildings, including water heater replacements, grease interceptor installations, drain line modifications, new fixture rough-ins, and sewer lateral work. Projects involving new or modified systems typically also require a plan review submittal to Portland BDS before a permit is issued. Routine maintenance: drain cleaning, grease trap pumping, backflow testing, fixture repair, generally does not require a permit. All permitted commercial plumbing work in Oregon must be performed by a licensed Oregon journeyman plumber. Lovett holds all required Oregon plumbing licenses and handles the entire permit process, including inspection scheduling and final sign-off documentation.
From grease trap maintenance to 2am emergency responses, Lovett Services provides the discreet, professional infrastructure support that hospitality properties demand.
