What are your arguments for or against letting it mellow if it is yellow?
And if you somehow disagree with flushing it down if it is brown, I suppose I would like to hear about that as well.
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Always flush. I have a septic tank and if you don't make sure to run some minimum amount of water into it, it'll get crusty and start to have clog problems. As long as we're running water though it's great for 8-10 years between pumps.
Better to just run more water when possible.
Also it's nasty if someone goes to take a dump and there's piss chilling in there. If you get hit with Posideon's kiss it's gonna be double nasty. So you flush it before doing your business and now the net effect is zero anyway, wasting the effort. Blech.
Posideon's kiss
I believe at that point it's Pissideon's kiss.
well, considering Poseidon lives in the ocean, it'd track that he'd have a kink for getting "wet and wild"
😂 Love the balls poke
8-10 years between pump... As in emptying it or as in replacing the pump? Because if it's the former then that's way longer than it should!
yes, 8-10yr between emptying it. It's a fairly large tank (1800gal iirc?) for a small family. The last time we had it done the local guy said it looked great and there weren't any problems. so something must be working right.
however a rental with a smaller tank constantly had problems with clogging. find out tenant was from california and brought all their water saving fixtures with them and took military style showers so the tank never got any real thru-flow. plus was a very heavy tp user... yeah. gotta have water moving, put original fixtures on and told them to start throwing their tp in a trash can. no problems since.
Septic tanks should be emptied every two years, the tank might look great, it's your drain field that will be ruined way more quickly. People not draining their tank often enough is the reason why municipalities have started just adding it to their taxes and taking care of it themselves instead of letting people contaminate their lot.
yeah that was probably true 30-40 years ago when small tanks without baffles and straight outlet pipes were common. if you have an old property that hasn't had the tank replaced, do that. but these days bigger tanks have baffle separators between settling compartments, an output baffle, and a strainer on the output. you almost never get any solids going out to the leech field unless the strainer collapses and the input will clog long before that is likely to happen.
If you have to throw your toilet paper in the trash instead of flushing it in order to not have issues then yeah, you're not emptying it often enough.
But hey, you do you and you deal with the issues, I mean, what's a new septic system when you can save the equivalent of 100$ a year, right?
We don't put tp in the trash at our family home and have no problems.
The rental unit has to because of the smaller tank (it has a ~900gal one or something) and it normally gets emptied on a 3 year cycle- as it had been for about 10 years without issue before this tenant moved in and problems arose because of their copious TP usage.
Thanks for the advice though 👍
I have a friend with a septic tank, the system is old, probably long overdue for some kind of serious maintenance or replacement that they've been putting off because the town is doing some big expansion of the sewer lines and their street is supposed to be on the list for it and they intend to get hooked up to it, but no one seems to know quite when that's coming. Their property also generally has some weird drainage issues and is sort of in a semi-wetland area, so their septic tank sometimes has a hard time dealing with things when we get a lot of rain, so they have to have a let it mellow policy sometimes depending on the weather. Most of the time the guys will just opt to go find a tree in the back yard.
Yeah drain field saturation is a pain in the dick when in an area with high water table or very claey soils. We're lucky as our volcanic soil is coarse and just sucks water away so drain field problems are basically nonexistent.
Hope they get hooked up to city sewer. Sounds like their local area and well water quality would greatly benefit.