The Steepest Poo Pit Ever Installed

The product gets specified, the unit ships, the crew installs it, and everyone moves on.

Then there are jobs like the one in Ogden, Utah.

The Problem With the Grade

A few years ago, a project in Ogden came to the Poo Pit team with a challenge that was stopping the job before it started. The grade that needed to be achieved was described simply as nearly impossible. The terrain demanded inlet configurations and slope angles that a standard manhole, concrete or otherwise, couldn't accommodate without significant field modification, if at all.

In a concrete world, that kind of site condition becomes a contractor's problem to solve in the field. Cut it differently. Build around it. Accept a compromise and document it. None of those outcomes are good for the contractor, the engineer, or the municipality that has to maintain whatever gets built.

What Custom Engineering Actually Looks Like

The Poo Pit is custom built to project specifications. Inlet sizes, inlet angles, and grade are not fixed parameters that the project has to conform to. They're variables that get designed into each unit before it ships.

For the Ogden job, the crew sent the grades they needed to achieve. The Poo Pit team designed units around those grades. The result was the highest-slope Poo Pit ever built, 20% grade on the inlets. A configuration that would have been a field problem with any other product became an engineering solution before the unit ever left the facility.

The pits went in. The job got done. And the infrastructure that came out of it was built to spec, not built to compromise.

What This Means for Engineers and City Officials

For engineers specifying infrastructure on complex sites, the Ogden project is worth understanding. The ability to send grades and angles and receive a unit built to those exact specifications isn't a minor convenience. It changes what's possible on jobs that would otherwise require significant workarounds.

For city officials, it means infrastructure that was designed for the actual conditions of the site, not adapted to fit a standard product after the fact. That distinction matters for long-term performance. A manhole installed at the right grade, with the right inlet angles, built from a material that won't corrode or degrade, is a different long-term outcome than one that was field-modified to approximate the right conditions.

The Broader Point About Customization

The Ogden job is an extreme example, but the principle applies across the range of projects the Poo Pit serves. Every unit is built to the project. Inlet sizes from 6 to 12 inches. Upstream angles from 45 to 315 degrees from downstream. Grade configurations that can match conditions that would stop a standard product cold.

That customization is done upfront, before the unit ships. Which means the install runs cleanly, without field surprises, and the infrastructure that goes in the ground is exactly what was designed. On a job with difficult conditions, that's not a small thing. It's the difference between a project that closes on time and one that doesn't.

If you have a project with conditions that don't fit the standard playbook, that's exactly the kind of conversation we want to have. Contact our team.