Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Just Think One Day At A Time

I get a lot of calls from people who don't understand much of anything about septic systems other than they are "supposed" to pump the septic tank from time to time and that eventually you'll have to replace the system (meaning the disposal field). They listen to the "experts" and having no other source of information, they blindly and most often dumbly follow what they are told to do. It seems this is a sad commentary on so much of the decision making we in America do these days.

There is for me an interesting aspect of the commonly accepted designs for septic systems that property owners with septic systems really need to be think about...the common anaerobic septic tank. In fact, it is just plain silly to demand that septic systems have standard anaerobic septic tanks now that the Pirana technology is available. The government regulators and bureaucrats continue to force us to use anaerobic septic tanks to concentrate contaminating organic waste and bacteria, building up the "inventory" or both over time, until we have to remove them to some other facility, in very concentrated form, for digestion and disposal. I've mentioned this fact in passing before, but the more I think about it, the more ludacrious the whole premise is.

We humans build on what we know. We started out with outhouses, moved with flush toilets to cesspools, and with the maintenance required of cesspools, septic tanks and leach lines were created to reduce maintenance and increase the time before failure of the soil. Now we have aerobic systems but they were designed to be inefficient because they are designed to deal with the effluent leaving septic tanks that have sequestered the vast majority of the organic load as stated above. The aerobic systems can only handle what's left in the waste stream after the septic tank has sequestered and concentrated the vast majority of the load. Even then, the aerobic systems need constant maintenance. The Pirana in the septic tank is digesting and recycling the daily load each day. There is no concentration of organic matter or bacteria that are the ultimate problem. Removing each days organic load received by the septic tank each day is such a simple solution to this most common problem.

There Pirana doesn't disinfect the effluent. The Pirana System easily deals with the daily organic load and deliver out of the septic tank highly treated effluent that we can now do something beneficial with the effluent, or at least the disposal fields won't fail from the most frequent problem...biomat clogging of the soil. The key is only dealing with one day's organic load each day in the septic tank, instead of allowing the waste and contaminants to concentrate creating the classic problems of septic systems. Its the old ounce of prevention vs a pound of cure trick Granny always mentioned to me. Deal with problems when they are small and you won't have to deal with big problems.

Think about it.

Thanks for stopping by.