How a Septic System Works: Tips, Inspections & Maintenance

People have to know, one of the main things when you do an inspection, home inspection, open inside of Friedman again. One of the main important things is to do septic inspections, especially lately when there are so many houses that have that are on septic. Come on out there. How about Jackson? 90% of Pine Lake Park is on septic, right? >> That's correct. Um they are spreading out and the further we go, the less sewers there are. So >> So so far >> [laughter] >> So there's no problem? A little bit of extra scum. I don't like so much that part, but that's not the heart of the system. If you stand with me a second, I'll show you what the heart of the system looks like. >> What are you doing now? >> So this is called the outlet of the tank. Um I'll explain to you how a tank works. Basically, the tank acts like a very big separator. Um everything the sewer wise comes in goes in by the inlet over there, that white cap. And there's a vertical pipe. That pipe forces the uh sewage to break apart and fall down. Heavy stuff fall down to the bottom of the tank. >> And the water goes with >> stays in the middle of the tank. Think of it as a three-layer uh cake. And then the top there's the floating stuff, which you want to eliminate as much as possible. It's grease, oil, um tissues, wipes, stuff like that. What you saying is the the water is in the middle. The outlet is a little bit lower than the inlet, and only the water flows out of the outlet. It goes into this area here. This is called a distribution uh leach field. I'll I'll walk you through it when I get the camera inside. What you saying is I'm trying to get my camera into what's called a distribution box. The distribution box is a small concrete box underground. That's where the sewer the water only, remember how I explained to you there's a three separate levels. So only the water goes out of the tank and flows into what's called a distribution box. >> You can see you can see how the septic was treated like it was a healthy way or they like used it. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So we're looking to minimize the top layer. The more scum there is on the top layer, the more problematic the septic may be. So it's a sign that it was either they used bad tissues for the system or there's too much grease being used, stuff like that. Wipes, correct. There's no such thing as flushable wipes and if you do flush wipes, please call me. You see what we've found? Yes, the what I just now did is I got my camera into the exit of the tank and we got it into what's called a distribution box. If you want to see it live over here what the inside looks like. It's a small box, probably about 2 ft long, 1 ft wide by 1 ft You see all those pipes around and around? There's one straight ahead, there's two on each side. What happens is the pipes spread out under the ground about 5 to 6 ft deep and the pipes have holes in them. They have little holes on bottom and they lay in a bed of rocks and then some more advanced systems have different things that the pipes lay on and the water seeps out of the system. So essentially every gallon that comes into the tank a gallon of water goes out. So this here is the heart of the system. We want to make sure that the ground is accepting water. If you look now, you can actually see that we started the flow test. You see a little bit of water flowing at the bottom of the screen? That's inside the box. So I'm checking to see to make sure that the water level in the tank doesn't in the distribution box doesn't go up. >> Got it. >> If it were to go up, that means that the ground is not accepting water. So that's what I'm looking for. The The main thing that I'm looking for As I explained earlier, it's a little bit of mazel, a little bit of taking care. What causes the ground not to accept water? Sometimes the water table can shift, that it can change the level, stuff like that. Sometimes ground just gets too saturated, can't accept water, but sometimes when we start doing things that like flushing grease, chicken soup, chunks we're not supposed to go down, even regular sewers, but at least in a regular sewer it goes away and it becomes a city's problem, but here it stays your problem. So once that starts happening, you're in big trouble. Um usually you have to replace the whole leach field, you're looking at $15,000 range. >> Ouch. >> Um yeah. So it's important to know how to use a septic, to use it properly, and if you do that I I've seen septics that haven't even been pumped in 20 years. >> What? >> So there's what's Inside there's there's living organisms, little microbes, and they break apart the the feces at least they break it apart, and that itself can go out flow down and go through the ground. >> Really? >> And in Mama's never have to pump it, but I I I hear this your family, I recommend They say every 3 to 5 years, I say every 2 to 3 years for you this your family. Because why not? It's it's 5 600 dollars to pump it as opposed to yeah, as opposed to 20 something thousand dollars to replace, so. >> Wow. Wow. Yiddy, I love this education. >> It's not so complicated if you know what you're doing, you know what you're looking for, and uh I try to help my customers make the most educated decision. 732-867-PIPE for all your sewer backups and septic inspections. >> So all the 732 >> 867-PIPE 7473. >> It's called Yiddy. >> Thank you very much for that.