It’s a thriller!

Appreciate it’s a how long is a piece of string job(bie), ball park family of four?

Will not require pushing.

Usually around £200.

Some authorities do it for free once a year.

You may need to ring around for quotes, then you’ll know.
That’s what I used to do.

Until a farmer mate of mine started doing it for freeeeeee!

£200 or so here in South Bucks

That a year jonnyboi? Or a few empties per annum.

Easel – WTF is he doing with it, I’d be worried for him if that’s his hobby!

spreading it on his fields – pretty common although did cause a nasty food poisoning outbreak in Lanarkshire (IIRC) a few years back…

We get ours done annually (family of five) but a neighbour moved I last year and theirs hadn’t been emptied in 16 years! Was an elderly couple so think it depends on usage.

Excellent, doing costing on a new gaffe so just looking for an indication. Will go for *2 per annum, belt n braces

Easel – WTF is he doing with it, I’d be worried for him if that’s his hobby!

Doing what footflaps said.

Having said that, I’m talking pre 2000, when I had a septic tank.

A funny thing happenned once though.
He sucked the crap out of the tank & went off to fertilize some fields with the effluent & part way through the flow stopped, so he went to the back of the tank to check the spray nozzle & realised it was blocked with what appeared to be a very small plastic plantpot. (he could see it) So he grabbed a hammer from the tractor cab & gave it a big whack. Forgetting that he hadn’t knocked off the power from the PTO. He consequently got covered in my shit as the offending plantpot shattered. 😕

(One of my little boys had dropped the pot down a vent on the septic tank lid)

All of it, of course 🙂

It’s a criminal offence to spread untreated sewage sludge (e.g. Septic tank waste) onto farmland, see the Sewage Use in Agriculture Regulations.

It is an utterly vile practice which can spread disease to animals and into food crops, contaminate ground and pollute watercourses, as well as spreading non biodegradable waste included in it to the soil and making local residents life a misery from the odour.

Treated sewage sludge from water authority treatment works doesn’t do any of the above if spread correctly and actually has a benefit to the soil unlike untreated stuff which can actually have a negative impact on its quality.

So please employ a proper disposal person to take it to the local treatment works rather than getting your farmer neighbour to sort it.

Must be a record. I’ve never read so much cr*p on STW.

hadn’t been emptied in 16 years!

We emptied ours when we first moved in 14 years ago. Haven’t emptied since. Family of three including a teenager. I think if the tank and drainage field are working well, you perhaps don’t need to be emptying it once a year? It takes time for the tank to develop those biochemical processes that break the waste down. Local farmer told us to throw a (dead) chicken in to catalyse it when we started out.

I thought a septic tank ‘processed’ the ‘stuff’ through anaerobic digestion leaving water and a bit of sludge. If it’s working properly, it shouldn’t need emptying? Isn’t it a cesspit (tank) that merely stores the ‘stuff’ for periodic emptying (uuuughhh).

Many septic tanks are under size for houses waste outputs coupled with all the chemicals (bleach) folk pour down their toilet it would be wise to budget for it when moving to a new house.

Agreed, septic tanks shouldn’t need emptying really. But people put all sorts of stuff down them (baby wipes, sanitary towels, nappies) as well as harsh chemicals which kill all the bugs which help decompose the waste so they invariably need emptying regularly.

A house we lived in previously hadn’t theirs emptied often but my parents never emptied it as they were careful as to what went down the drains.

Ours is done every 2 years.

We use Scottish Water, and when I check last year they were half the price of any Indy’s.

And 14 years…

And 14 years…

We contribute significant amounts to Ecover’s turnover 🙂

Septic tanks still need emptying as you will get a build up. At least get it checked as you might not have a properly working system and think it’s fine.

Worth noting that if you have a system that discharges to ground water then by 2020, or sooner if selling, then you need to upgrade to a proper mini treatment plant.

Just happen to be looking into this for our new build as I want to use the drainage ditches but need to make sure they flow sufficiently.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/general-binding-rules-small-sewage-discharge-to-a-surface-water

Buying or selling a house with a septic tank?

Here’s a little story about septic tanks: when I was a kid my neighbour had two manhole covers in his garden which, being kids, we naturally opened. One had a boring gully in it, clean and dry and entering a brick wall between it and the second cover. When we opened this, lo and behold we found a big circular brick chamber with a conical roof and about 2 feet of crystal clear water in it, and a white sludge at the bottom. There was no smell and we hadn’t a clue what we had found. Hard to believe this now but my neighbour dropped several old oil drums into the second hole, intending to build a raft on them giving us a nice little floating den. This turned out to be too difficult so we broke through the bricks separating the two inspection holes and then made a wood cover faced with bricks to hide the hole, Great Escape style. Eventually we lost interest in the project and went off to make cut ‘n cover tunnels in another part of his garden, equally dangerous. I now know we had found the old septic tank, the house must have been built on the 30s and this was in the 60s so since the house was connected to the main sewer the sepsis had done its job and purified the contents of the tank. God knows what would have happened if one of us had fallen into the tank as the sludge was very soft and we wouldn’t have been able to get out easily.

As others have said above, for the process of sepsis to work the environmental conditions have to be right and cleaning products especially those containing HCL or citric acid would change the acidity of the tank contents and prevent the all-important bacteria from growing. We had problems with our tank when I lived in the Dales, it filled up fast and absolutely stank – but that’s another story.