We seem to have had nothing but bad news lately. The latest came from our trusty island septic installer who, in reality is kind of jack of all trades, but I won't go into that now. He lives on the island, has installed hundreds of septic systems here, & is a bit of an island fixture. If he were older I could say he's a legend. He's honest & he's good, so we've stuck with him & had him do a variety of jobs. Sometimes he operates on "island time", but when he knows it's an emergency he's there for you. We got that awful loud buzzer in the middle of the night Saturday, so David called him about 7:30 Sunday & left a message.
Emergencies, even medical emergencies, always seem to happen on weekends, so we didn't hear back until Monday morning; he came Monday afternoon. The immediate problem was a pump wire that had shorted out, but when he opened one of the tanks on our sand filter septic system he gave us the really bad news: the system was failing & needed to be replaced. Why? Naturally we asked.
Sand filter systems are used only when standard gravity septic systems can't be used, such as, in our case, there is not enough soil to properly install a regular system. Most of the island soil is glacial till & hardpan, so it's practically impossible to install a gravity system., although they were installed years ago before sand filter systems were used. Many have been replaced, however, because they, too, failed.
Donnie, our installer, told us the reason ours was failing was because when we built the house the county required a certain grade of sand be used for installation & now it's proved to be too dense to absorb the effluent properly, so the effluent has backed up into the tanks again. We've had the tanks pumped according to the requirements we were given, but even that wasn't enough.
He's recommending an aerobic system, which is supposed to be fairly new and designed for the same type of problem soil as a sand filter system. I spent yesterday & today researching on the Web & have come away convinced I DON'T want it! It requires frequent maintenance--probably about $500/year--& that's today's cost, which is sure to go up as the years to on--& many, many prohibitions on what NOT to put down your toilets & drains, such as: garbage disposal waste, oil, suds, bleach & the usual no-no's of any kind of paper or cloth except for toilet paper, but what threw me was "medications". Not medications that someone might throw down a toilet, but the residual of a medication that a person excretes. So if we're taking certain medications we can't use the toilets! Who knows what medications we may have to take in future? This just does not seem very practical. And I have to use those Clorox tablets that you put in the toilet tank to keep rust from forming since we have a lot of iron in our water. I couldn't use those, either. So this is something we have to think over carefully.
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