Dirty Septic Tank Stories. From Toilet to Tap??

Warning: This post contains helpful tips for your home's plumbing welfare, but also some dirty raw facts of life.

Ready to continue? Your home is hooked up to one of two sewer systems. If your home is "on septic" it's still a sewer system. Homes built with septic tanks and fill lines are Onsite Sewer Management Systems that treat a home's sewer drainage right in your own backyard. The other way of magically making the

contents of your toilet bowl to disappear is to be connected to a City Sewer Service Line that chutes your poop miles and miles under the streets of downtown and winds up at a treatment facility. Your toilet water can be turned into tap water here! But that's another story for another day ;)

My purpose today is to help you understand the stuff that happens on your end of the sewer line and why so many homeowners and residents find relief with sewer cleaning and septic tank pumping when their toilets back up. So if your on city sewer service the building sewer line can be damaged over time due to shifts caused by roots and the deterioration of the sewer line. In the fall and winter months trees focus on root growth. They can sense the nitrogen rich contents of the sewer line and can invade and even break PVC and cast iron sewer lines. Overtime the pipe material becomes brittle and can break with the force of a tree root contorting the line. Roots will also find joints in the pipe that are not perfectly sealed and grow in from there. Once roots get in they can grow 2 inches per month quickly causing a backup of the drain line.

So what now?! The use a plumbing service sewer cleaning can shear the roots out of the line and unclog the drain and regain proper flow of the sewer line. Sometimes this is a workable solution and only needed once or twice in 10 years. Other times the roots are more invasive and the best solution is to excavate the broken area and repair where the roots are getting in. The same process of cutting out roots applies for both city sewer and septic tank systems.

To conclude for today, wanna hear a dirty septic tank story that actually happened on one of our jobs?? We we're on a service call to pump a backed up septic tank for a large family. All the family were home that day and I guess curiosity got the best of them. They circled around the dirty tank we had just dug up to see the wonders inside. Grandma, grandpa, mom, dad, two teenagers, a little girl, and a little boy watched in anticipation as we carefully pulled the access cover off the tank. At this point we had never had such an audience for our work. As we all stood gazing at the bubbling dark water several long used condoms floated to the surface. Suddenly our audience became embarrassed realizing that the contents of that tank all came from them. The mom looked at the dad "we don't use condoms" and then both parents looked accusingly at the teenagers red faces who could only look at the ground at this point. "Maybe it was grandma!" the young man shrieked! Awkward! "We're just here to pump your pooh guys!" My co worker exclaimed. What Grandma does is her business!