There are hundred of thousands or rural homes still with septic tanks in use.....if maintained properly and you don't put bleach and washing up detergent down your drains destroying all the healthy bacteria ......local farmers will come and suck out your tanks and use the contents as fertilizer on their fields....
True, There are places so rural they depend on septics yet. But there are problems with that, for one thing a lot of stuff get flushed that should not be (tampax, plastic bottlecaps, ...), Septics cannot handle that properly, but purification plants can sort it out, and then speed-rot the rest to make it into 'clean' fertilizer.
People should not put undesirable things down any drain.....In London fast food shops and restaurants tip all their hot fat and oil into the sewers where if sets hard......the tip engine oil down it and so many hadozous chemicals as well....it all ends up in the sea and we eat the fish and bottom feeders that have to live in all human waste products...:(
5 yrs. ago after my dad died of cancer. They said the cancer drugs in the tank would kill of all good bacteria. I cleaned the pump filter a little over 2 weeks ago (oh, joy).
I had to do some clean-out on my lateral line earlier. The surgical gloves tore. -__-
This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at March 14, 2018 7:18 PM MDT
About a year ago. We had been living at Heartfire for 15 years when it finally became too full - so it must have also contained the excreta of the people who lived here before us. A bit mind-boggling, since the pump-extractor-man found a syringe in it and other paraphernalia of illicit drug use. At the same time, we learned that the system had not been draining properly, so we had to hire a plumber to build a new sewer-water filter pit. That gave us a chance to position the new pit along the hill just above the orchard. The fruit trees have given us a bonanza harvest this year. :)
My home is on the sewer system but as I recall from my real estate sales days the average was every four years. Larger families maybe more often, single folks maybe longer.
Last fall and I kept some of the crusty stuff for my rhubarb. Might sound gross but my rhubarb gets leafs the size of a VW. I put it on in the fall time so it doesn't effect the taste of the rhubarb . Cheers!
JakobA the unAmerican. 