Poorly draining soils, high water tables, steep slopes, and bedrock are a fact of life in our region. Combined with ever tightening standards from state and county health departments, more and more property owners in rural areas are discovering that a traditional septic tank and leach field is not sufficient to obtain a permit when buidling a new home on a site with poor perculation.
Challenges also face existing homeowners in our region. As homes mature, failures of older septic systems are becoming more common place. Saturated drain fields, restrictive soil conditions and small lot sizes frequently prevent a homeowner from simply replacing the old system with another traditional leach field on their property. Unfortunately, a problem isn't usually noticed until the house's old septic system is inspected just before the house is sold. Without a properly fuctioning sewage treatment system, typically the closing of the home sale cannot be finalized.
If you find that the Health Department will not approve a traditional septic system and leach field on your property, RJM has the expertise to engineer a practical and reliable sewage treatment system to overcome the challenges of your property. Working with a qualified soil evaluator, we will survey your property and create engineering plans that are suitable for review and approval by the county health department. Our plans will identify what areas of your property are required for a new drainage field and demonstrate to the heatlh department through calculations that your system will function properly. Furthermore, we'll specify what equipment your installation contractor needs to obtain and work with the manufactor during design to ensure that your system meets the soil loading limit on your property.Typically, an engineered sewage treatment system may be as simple as importing appropriate fill to your site to create a leach field mound, or a combination of aerators and pressurized drip tubing may be necessary. Either way, we can design a system that uses the available space on your property to its fullest potential.
Click here for an example of the existing conditions on a typical, small residential lot with a failed septic system.
And then click here to see how we were able to re-use much of the existing drain field by installing pressurized drip tubing, which are placed only 8" - 12" below the surface.
Engineered sewage treatment systems aren't just for a single house, either. In reality, many houses can been connected to a single community sewage treatment system. On every property, each home has their own septic tank, which serves as the primary treatment for suspended solids. Instead of discharging to a drainage field on the lot, each tank has a low-pressure pump that lifts the sewage effluent to a community treatment system, which may be contain a combination of filters, UV disinfection, and pressurized drip fields. This kind of system can be advantageous in distributing the expense of an engineered system over multiple homes. At RJM, we have experience in designing small community systems which can be an excellent fit in newly designed subdivisions or in older neighborhoods that are experiencing multiple simultaneous septic failures.
Contact us today to see how we can best solve your individual or community sewage treatment problems.
