Septic- hi water table - checkvalve ?

Mar 16, 2006 2 Replies
F

Hi,



I recently bought a house with a "troubled" septic system. During periods of heavy rain, the water table is high; the ground is saturated. The house is on a hillside, and all the water coming down the hill backfills into the leachfield.



What to do ?



The last owners left us $20,000 plans for a fancy new shallow system (it even comes with its own website...), but is there anything we can do to our old system ?



We could put curtain drains above the leachfields.. if we knew where they were. We only have a few crude drawings of where they might be. Has anybody done this before ? How hard is it ?



The other option which the honeydipper guy recommended was to put checkvalves around the tank to keep "water" from flowing into it. We could deal with the reduced volume for the short periods of saturation. Has anybody tried this ?



Thanks for any advice, all you septic old timers out there.



This is my first septic, and WHAT A WINNER.



Thanks,



Laura



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L

There seem to be a lot of suggestions on how to prop up an old or failing septic system out there, but I don't know if there's any true answer other than to contact the town/county engineer and get a new system designed and installed. If you absolutely HAVE to work with this system right now (believe me, I know how that goes - our new septic cost $26,000), here's my cheap solution.

If you own the hill that is dumping all of the water into your leach field, maybe diverting the runoff around your leach field would help. Burying some drainage pipe perpendicular across the hill in a couple of spots and running those into more drainage pipe running down the hill but outside the perimeter of your septic field may divert enough of the water to let the system work properly. You MIGHT need to check with the local engineer to see if this is acceptable or not and to find out how far from the leach lines you need to stay with your drainage pipe and where you can discharge it.

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C

You could use a dye to size the extent of the leach field. Goggle for "dye leach field" as a starter

Good luck

Art

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