I‘ve been thinking about this post, which may eventually be a whole category on its own, quite a bit lately. Even though you haven’t seen much evidence of it, I’ve been busy blogging in my head throughout the chaos that has been the move, and I’m swimming in ideas and inspiration, if not free time to type it all out.
One of the biggest changes for us as a family in the new house is the fact that we’re now on a well and septic system. I knew virtually nothing about well and septic systems on the day we first visited the house, but I’ve had an education and a half in the past couple of months. What I didn’t expect was that in learning to live with our own private wastewater system, we’ve become far more aware of our environmental footprint than we ever were on the city water and sewer system. I thought it would make an interesting occasional series in the blog if I shared some of our new-found and hard-earned knowledge. If well and septic systems are old hat for you, feel free to intervene and correct me as I go!
For today’s post, here’s a bit of Septic 101. When you are not connected to municipal sewers, anything you flush down your toilets, dump into your sinks or otherwise rinse down your drain goes into a big underground tank — the septic tank. In simplistic terms, here’s how it works. The septic tank has two chambers separated by a baffle. The solid and liquid wastes go into the first chamber, where the solids sink to the bottom and the liquids rise to the top. While the waste is in the septic tank, naturally-occurring bacteria are hard at work breaking it down. The liquids (called “scum”) pass through a pipe into the second chamber, and are further broken down by the bacteria. Then it flows out into a set of pipes called the weeping bed or leaching bed, a series of perforated pipes laid out in a big square or rectangle buried at least three feet under the ground. The waste water is further broken down by microbes in the soil and eventually returned to the groundwater system. Somewhere around every three to five years, depending on your tank size and family usage, you pay someone to suck all the accumulated solid waste out of the tank. Delicious, eh?
The weekend we spent considering putting an offer in on the house, I read pages upon pages of information about septic tanks and frankly? I was horrified. The poop flows out into the YARD? Simplistically speaking, yes, but not exactly. When the septic system is working well, everything is completely natural and sanitary and it is a very effective system. Unfortunately, when the system fails, it can be disastrous — from a financial, environmental and, for me, emotional perspective. The ways that the system can fail are myriad, and I lost more than a couple of hours sleep over it in the early days of my education.
For one thing, septic tanks are expensive to replace, in the order of tens of thousands of dollars. They have a life span of 20 to 40 years, depending on whom you ask. And guess how old ours is? From what I can tell, 42 years old. Eep! But, we hired a professional septic inspector as part of our home inspection, and he said that the system is functioning very well and we have no cause for concerns. For now. *touch wood*
Monitoring the health of your septic system is vital. If the effluent is not breaking down properly or something is blocking the perforations in your leaching bed, you could have problems from sewage seeping up from the ground to sewage seeping into the groundwater that supplies your (and your neighbour’s) well water to sewage backing into the (*shudder*) house, not to mention the cost of repairs or replacement. It’s a pretty good incentive for increased environmental stewardship!
Some things that I might have done on the municipal sewer system are expressly forbidden, like rinsing paint trays in the sink. When I painted the kitchen cupboards, I learned that you can wrap a roller in saran wrap overnight if you’re out of day but still not done the job, and you can even put it in the freezer if you have to wait a few days before you get back to the job. When the job is done, wash your brushes and rollers out in a five-gallon pail of water, and then leave the pail open. The water will evaporate out, and you can scrape the semi-dried-out paint into the garbage — or just dispose of the pail.
You can’t dump cooking oil or grease down the drain, so I now dump it into a mason jar that I keep under the sink. We have to be careful of letting coffee grounds or egg shells rinse down the drain — a bit of a challenge since our coffee maker overflows about once a month, spilling hot coffee and grounds all over the countertop and sometimes the floor. And no kleenex or (ugh!) tampons in the toilet, either. 🙁
I have become as vigilant in reading cleaning supply labels as I was in reading food labels. No more anti-bacterial soap (although the jury seems to be out on this one), minimal household bleach, and no liquid fabric softeners. Did you know vinegar can be used as a fabric softener alternative? I haven’t tried that one yet.
I spent a lot of the weekend googling “what happens if the septic system freezes” because it occured to me that Ottawa winters are long and cold, but it turns out that you really don’t have to do much if you’re on a year-round system. It will take care of itself, if it’s functioning properly. I’m sure there are many other facets of septic stewardship that will panic me in months to come, though.
If you had asked me a few months ago if I were environmentally conscious, I would have said, “Of course!” I recycle madly, even picking things out of the garbage that other family members might have tossed away. I use my Green Bin for most of our household compostables, and regularly walk through the house turning off switches and nagging the boys to do the same. But really? I was in the minor leagues of environmental awareness before now. There’s nothing like the threat of untreated sewage seeping up onto your lawn or backwashing into your house to make you an environmental vigilante!
One of the biggest learning curves for us has been water conservation, the topic of my next post in this occasional series.
For now, though, I’m always curious as to what you think. Are you like me, a child of the city whose jaw dropped at the idea of a personal wastewater plant on the property, or are you rolling your eyes at my endless naiveté? And if you have any, I’d be grateful if you share any advice or knowledge. Not sure I need to hear your horror stories, though — I’ve got enough of those in my imagination to keep me awake through months of sleepless nights!