Realtors, a question?

[middle-aged mom]

Septic tank maintenance is often a function of soil composition/percolation and topography -tank positioning. Some areas drain better than others. Some areas flow downhill and others do not.

A minimum biannual pump out, is common in my area.

Tanks and fields are sized to the original structure. Adding on, is sometimes not possible without installing a new tank/laying a new septic field, per code.

[karibear]

Originally Posted by Sweetbeet

Weird, we (and everyone we know around here in upstate NY) try to have our tank pumped every 2-3 years. We were told, once when we waited almost 5 years, that the "level of solids" was getting dangerously high (Eeeeewwww!). Don't think you'd want to mess with that.

The first of the houses I grew up in, in west St Louis County MO, had to have the septic pumped and replaced, but that was only because there were a couple of trees close to it whose root systems destroyed it. Once that was done, there were no more problems, and we lived there for another 8-10 years. Wasn't too long after we moved that municipal sewer lines started hooking everyone up, though - I imagine some areas got done sooner than others.

One of the places where I lived in rural Alaska had a tank that would have needed pumping, but the borough [roughly equivalent to a county] started installing sewer lines outside the city limits, so the timing was good - especially since the house wasn't on the road system! But the problem with our tank then was that we'd had someone caretaking the place one summer, and they did a lot of screwy things, flushing a lot of stuff that was never meant to end up in a septic tank. It was easier for them to do that than to carry trash to the nearest dumpster.