My sister recently bought a house with a septic tank. There was leakage out behind the tank and the tank itself was well overdue for a pump out so we got it emptied and excavated behind the outlet only to find a fairly crude soakaway which had failed leaving a foul smelling mess. We extended the outlet pipe to another area of the garden, built a new soakaway and a soakaway overflow for good measure draining to a stream.
Everything appeared to be working fine for a couple of months until we started to get bad odours from the soakaway overflow, with water obviously coming right through the new soakaway. The house is built on clay soil and when the new soakaway was excavated the digger driver did his best to dig down past the clay layer as far as possible but it's looking as if this has been unsuccessful and the soakaway is already flooded.
It's looking as if we need to find some other means of absorbing the effluent (possibly taking all the grey water out of the equation by filtration or similar so that the soakaway has less work to do) but what puzzles me is why there is so much smell coming from effluent that has been 'treated' in the septic tank and I'm wondering if the tank is actually 'working' from a biological point of view. My understanding has always been that the treated effluent from a septic tank should be relatively odour free.
The tank is about 40 years old of concrete construction and unusually big for the size of the property. It has no internal baffle and the inlet and outlet 'tees' are in place. There are only two people in the house and they are scrupulous about not using harmful chemicals, bleach etc.
Could it be that the tank is actually too big and the ratio of water to solids is too high thus preventing the biological action from working efficiently?
Anyone got any tips on
a) How to get a working soakaway in clay soil.
b) How to eliminate smell from the tank outlet.
Everything appeared to be working fine for a couple of months until we started to get bad odours from the soakaway overflow, with water obviously coming right through the new soakaway. The house is built on clay soil and when the new soakaway was excavated the digger driver did his best to dig down past the clay layer as far as possible but it's looking as if this has been unsuccessful and the soakaway is already flooded.
It's looking as if we need to find some other means of absorbing the effluent (possibly taking all the grey water out of the equation by filtration or similar so that the soakaway has less work to do) but what puzzles me is why there is so much smell coming from effluent that has been 'treated' in the septic tank and I'm wondering if the tank is actually 'working' from a biological point of view. My understanding has always been that the treated effluent from a septic tank should be relatively odour free.
The tank is about 40 years old of concrete construction and unusually big for the size of the property. It has no internal baffle and the inlet and outlet 'tees' are in place. There are only two people in the house and they are scrupulous about not using harmful chemicals, bleach etc.
Could it be that the tank is actually too big and the ratio of water to solids is too high thus preventing the biological action from working efficiently?
Anyone got any tips on
a) How to get a working soakaway in clay soil.
b) How to eliminate smell from the tank outlet.
