Sitting Water / Sludge

[HHILLS]

My house is located on the Niagara Escarpment, and i'm having a problem with parts of the septic bed always being wet. I have been living here for 3 years now, however with all the precipitation over the last 18 mths, I have noticed wet areas and in some cases a dark sludge pooling on the top surface... I have tried the aeration in the bed, however there was no change.
We have had the tank pumped out twice in the past year, with only 2 adults living in the house. Please advice.
HHILLS

[joed]

If your leach field is in an area that is prone to water saturation there is not much you can do other than find a better place for leach bed or install a raised bed.

[Wgoodrich]

Look around the area for a low area where water can drain to. If you can find a field tile or other outlet like a low land area I would stay at least 10' away from the leach field and install a perimeter drain to just below teh elevation of your leach field pipes draining it as a separate subsurface drain to a positive outlet. This will artificially lower your water table allowing you septic to work.

Good Luck

Wg

[AllanJ]

Don't look now but pumping a septic tank when there is little or no sludge in it accomplishes nothing. The tank is supposed to rest approximately 85 percent full. The reason for setting a time interval between pumpings is that you don't know at first how much sludge has accumulated. If there was a log of sludge then you would have to make the time intervals shorter.

If you use a sink garbage grinder a lot, your septic tank will fill up with sludge more quickly.

You could have the sludge you see in the septic bed tested to find out whether it came from the septic tank. Finding septic tank sludge out there suggests that at one time the tank was not pumped in timely fashion. In turn the septic bed could have become saturated with grease and other materials so even minor rainstorms leave water on the surface that takes a long time to dissipate.

[Fischer]

Don't look now but pumping a septic tank when there is little or no sludge in it accomplishes nothing. The tank is supposed to rest approximately 85 percent full. The reason for setting a time interval between pumpings is that you don't know at first how much sludge has accumulated. If there was a log of sludge then you would have to make the time intervals shorter.

If you use a sink garbage grinder a lot, your septic tank will fill up with sludge more quickly.

You could have the sludge you see in the septic bed tested to find out whether it came from the septic tank. Finding septic tank sludge out there suggests that at one time the tank was not pumped in timely fashion. In turn the septic bed could have become saturated with grease and other materials so even minor rainstorms leave water on the surface that takes a long time to dissipate.


Could be a broken or clogged pipe in the drain field.

[AllanJ]

Are the wet areas near where the septic tank outlet feeds in or are the wet areas all over?

Sometimes you can dig up a small area in the drain field to repair a crushed drainage pipe particularly if you know that someone drove over the field in a particular location.

Digging a small area here and there also lets you do new perc' tests that in turn help you decide what to do next in terms of a new drain field design or new drain field.

If the pipes got infiltrated by tree roots, by the time you dug up the field to make repairs you might as well have put in a new drain field.