Z gets down and dirty

Honestly, Saturday could have been more fun than it was.  I’ve taken two days off just to get over it.

It all started a week earlier when Roses noticed that … oh dear, the delicacy required here … some of that which she thought had been flushed away for good was reappearing outside her window.  So my Best and Most Wonderful Friend came round with some drain rods.  I’m going to draw a heavy tarpaulin around the next couple of hours but it turned out that the septic tank was a bit full, which it shouldn’t have been.  And my septic tank was too, which was only emptied last summer and should have lasted for years.

Saturday was to be the day to sort it.  BMWF thought that the annexe septic tank drained into the house one, which I was fairly sure it didn’t, but we both agreed that mine needed sorting first, in case.  And a lot of bucketing of water happened.  This was not unpleasant water, the bacteria do a good job in breaking down and purifying – however, it’s not great fun, especially once we realised that the septic tank guy had left about 18 inches of sludge in the bottom and BMWF couldn’t find the outlet to rod it out.  At this time I wanted to get in touch with a different septic tank guy (I’d not been going to use the same one in any case, I reckoned he’d well overcharged me) and get the tanks emptied before going further, but I was overruled.  We bucketed out, um, sediment.  Not actually sewage, as I said, but it was sludgy, as the rabbits in the warren we tipped it into will have discovered.

Fast forward a few hours and we found the outlet pipe and it was thoroughly blocked with earth.  So BMWF got to work with a spade for an hour or so and it was discovered that a section of pipe has dropped and broken, a foot or so underground.  It’s clay pipe, no point in trying to insert a section, so I’ll have to have a trench dug, it be removed and replaced.  It’s around 20 yards long at a guess.

I lay in a bathful of scented water with just my nose sticking out for a while.  I was tired, stiff and achy.  And I wasn’t even doing much of the work.  LT has discovered rather more than he expected about life in the country.  He really didn’t expect to be barrowing the contents of a cesspit.

4 comments on “Z gets down and dirty

  1. Anonymous

    Hello Z. We’ve lived in two different homes which were blessed (?) with septic tank drainage. Come to think of it, I don’t want to go into detail, either; but it does make me think how appreciative we should be for modern drainage methods.

    Reply
  2. Z Post author

    I’ve always thought the septic tank was marvellous as it doesn’t deplete the water in a relatively dry area of the country. But this is certainly off-putting.

    Reply

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