Many areas outside of our major cities do not have a municipal sewer system, and instead rely on individual septic systems to drain and treat their waste water. If you’ve lived in a home with a septic tank for any length of time you’re aware that proper maintenance of your septic system is important if you want to avoid some serious problems. If you have already had problems with your drainage system and you are in the Atlanta area you’ll want to call an experienced Atlanta plumbing repair service.
Many people who have a septic tank have no idea how it works. They think it is a magical place where you can dump just any old thing and expect it to be “taken care of”. But in fact, septic systems don’t use magic to get rid of solid and semi-solid waste material. They use bacteria to break down waste matter – mostly human waste products and certain types of easily broken down paper – and they do an admirable job of it most of the time. But there are some things that a septic tank will simply not break down.
In my childhood I lived in a small village where most of the houses in town were built within a few hundred yards of a creek. From one end of town to the other sewer pipes and a good number of open sewer ditches connected the homes to the creek. In somes cases these ditches carried the runoff from septic tanks. In other cases the ditches were connected right up to the drain pipes from homes with no septic tank between the toilet and the ditch.
The result was pretty disgusting – raw sewage running in open ditches – although the ditches themselves tended to act as cleansing agents. The solid matter in the sewage from the houses would eventually settle on the bottom of the ditch and gradually break down into a black foul-smelling ooze. The liquid would either evaporate or run along the ditch and eventually be deposited in the creek.
When I was a young boy of about 10 or 12 my friends and I spent a good deal of our time exploring the creek. Like good CSI agents we could not help but notice that stuff floating in the open ditches, and it often gave us clues about the lives of the people living in those houses.
As you can imagine, some of those floating things were not easily broken down. Some were made of heavy-duty absorbent paper materials. Others were made of rubber or vinyl. Some of them are probably still there under the sediment on the bottom of the creek.
These adventures along the creek taught me two important things about life in a town with open ditches, and both of them can be summed up in the aphorism: “Be careful what you flush down your toilet.”
While it’s true that things have changed a lot since those days, the dynamics of sewage drains and septic tanks is still pretty much the same. Which means the next time you’re tempted to flush some greasy gooey stuff, or something made of cardboard or rubber or plastic or vinyl down your toilet, think of those open ditches with stuff floating in them. That’s exactly the way those things will look in your septic tank. Except they’re not going to float away into the river or settle to the bottom of the ditch. They’ll stay there until your tank stops working. And in some cases they’ll get into your weeping bed and plug that up too.
If you have been a bit careless about what you’ve been flushing down your toilet you may want to contact a septic tank specialist to have a look before you have real problems. If you’re in the Atlanta area you should look for Atlanta drain cleaning on the web. For a small fee they will pump your tank and give the system a thorough flushing out, and both you and your septic tank will be given a fresh start.