Friends in Garden Valley, idaho recently had a septic system put in. It cost
them $18,000. We saved a bunch of money even though up here it wouldn't have cost
that much. Thank you.
This is out where the leach field or drain field is going to go.
I have the laser set up seeing where it's going to end up, how much dirt I'm going to have to move,
Something worthwhile mentioning here is when you're pushing over trees
and you don't have something that has skid plates all the way underneath it, you want to remember
that the roots come up in the air and if you don't stop quick enough they can go up into
your radiator or radiator hose or some hydraulic hoses that are underneath the front of the rig.
The septic tanks being hard to get well I went ahead and dug the hole and two
weeks later it finally arrived. See the inspectors out watching what's going on.
They come out of Lewiston (Idaho) through Builder's Supply.
I marked the hole with a couple of pink lines so he knew where to back in.
I thought about trying to set the tank myself but it weighs about nine thousand pounds
and that would put the crane on my shop truck at maximum capacity.
They want the hole to be about six inches wider than what the tank is. I went ahead and
made it a foot just in case for little error. There's gravel in the bottom of the hole to
make it leveled out so the tanks lies flat. The straps and the holding points on the tank are so
that they just about have to have one of their straps to be able to move it when it's in so we
just let them go ahead and set it and we did the rest by hand. Lining it up, getting it set down.
This is a divided tank to keep the sludge in one end and the water to run out the other.
You have to make sure that you get the inlet and the outlet side placed in the proper place--where
you're going to have your inlet from the house and the outlet going to this drain field.
Put the level on after the tank was in--you could see it was level side to side, but it was just a
little bit off lengthwise. Evidently i didn't get the hole quite as big as I thought --so we had a
little trouble getting the lifting straps off. It was close on one edge so i had to get the bar and
knock some of the dirt out of the way, enough to where the strap would come off. You need the hole
deep enough so you got anywhere from six inches to a foot of dirt on top. Plastic tanks you can
get an extension that will sit on top of the tank to put your covers at ground level or just barely
below. Concrete ones don't (have an extension) they have a concrete lid. Once we got the tank in,
the weather turned bad and it started raining so it was almost a full year before I
got to put the drain field in. We had to get an extension from the health department--counties
and states all have different regulations. You need about a two to three inch drop from the
outlet of the tank to where the distribution or d-box is set which the lines come out of to go
to your drain field. Trying very carefully just to put a little bit of dirt around the
edge of the tank--put too much in there and get too much compacted in that might crack
the sides and push the side walls in. Some of you may have noticed the chains on the tractor.
The tires were wore out when we bought it and chains were half the cost of tires,
so we just bought chains to put on the tractor for traction. It works good because we don't
go anywhere on the highway. I didn't pack the dirt in around the tank-- like I said
afraid of putting pressure and cracking it. It settled about six inches maybe over the winter.
We debated a long time when we came back from Oregon on the kind of equipment to get. Personally
I like excavators a lot better, but we have a lot of snow in the wintertime so I need something with
a pretty good sized bucket and has a little more speed running up down the road than an excavator.
We knew we were going to have lots of digging between the foundation for the house, putting
in the septic tank drain fields, putting in water lines, power lines, so we settled on a backhoe.
The snap ring came off the end of this pin on the outrigger.
I'm just hooking a piece of wire on the end of it.
I have the ground partially cleared and I'm double checking on how much we're going to go down for
the leach field. Anyone who is starting a new piece of ground I would highly recommend you just
go buy a good laser transit. The amount of money you would spend on it is a lot less than it's going to
cost you if you have to have somebody come in, if you're doing the work yourself, or if you have to
go down and rent one. I was lucky enough to have a friend that has one and I've had it for almost
two years doing odd projects: putting up a barn, shop, putting in septic tanks, and everything
else so they really make a difference in how fast you can do things. String levels are all right,
but you never know there might be a little bit of sag--like the outlet pipe here. I think there's
only supposed to be about a three inch drop at the most in 15 feet. A string level is pretty hard to
keep that accurate and the leach field itself you're only going I believe a sixteenth or an
eighth of an inch a foot. So in my case we had 70 and 77 foot runs--that's only three inches in that
far. Pretty hard to keep track of the field. Probably had three to four percent drop from
one side of it to the other. I was just trying to get it a little closer to being level rather
than having to put one line down a lot deeper than the other. Trying to get the ground leveled out.
When you put your D box in, it has to be perfectly level or awful darn close to it. Where your water
distribution goes out equally--into however many lines--what are you doing trying to do is
to find the level for the tank for the output so you know how deep to make the whole trench.
They make both concrete and plastic distribution boxes. Everybody suggested
the concrete. They're a little bit more stable they say. Our ground is all hard clay and
it's a lot easier to level the box on a gravel pad rather than trying to do
it on the clay. Once you dig the clay up it all turns to powder and it doesn't pack back very well.
Cutting out the holes for the inlet and the outlet and the two lines that I ended up running. I
first thought i was going to have to run 390 foot lines, three feet wide for each leach
field line so I cut three holes in it. As it ended up we only had to have two with six foot gravel beds.
When you fill in around the pipe, I used gravel, you want to make sure that you get down and get
underneath the pipe on each side so that it doesn't shift around and make sure you have your
gravel underneath it fairly solid so your pipe doesn't get a bow in it when the ground settles.
They make a plastic ring which goes in the end of your pipe inside the d-box. It has an offset
hole in it so that when you start filling your d-box up with water you can turn those
plastic rings. They act like a cam and raise or lower the level
that goes through the pipe so that they go through the pipes evenly.
That pipe I'm working with looks like it's got a big bow in it, but actually doesn't.
I'm trying to get some last minute adjustments with the level on the box.
Inside the tank there are t-pipes on both ends and the inlet side which comes from your house
is just a little bit shorter than the one on the outside, it's just a hair longer.
So these pipes are actually going into t- fittings and not just straight into the tank.
We're using the drain rock drain field so we need to put at least eight inches of drain rock
underneath the bottom of where the pipe will sit. The ditch has to be three feet on each side of the
pipe so it has to be six feet wide. I tried to make it seven just for a little extra and then
once the pipe is in another bunch of drain rock has to go in so there is enough that covers the
pipe and the rest of the field which would give us just about 14 or 15 inches that has to have at
least 12. We've got the ditch dug which means the bottom end needs to be about three inches
lower than the top end because that's about how much drop we're having in the pipe. We started putting
drain rock in. It was real easy on this first ditch because i
had lots of room. The second ditch I had to put the rock in as I dug the ditch because
I couldn't get behind the other end to put rock in. That made it kind of a pain. Putting the pipe in
the drain rock I used the laser level and every five feet of pipe i went down one quarter of an
inch so each pipe went down about half inch so that gave me just a little bit over a three inch
drop from one end of the other. You don't want the pipe flat because then the water won't run
the full length of the pipe before it goes out through the holes into the drain field and if you
make it too steep it runs right straight to the bottom end and so the top end isn't doing anything and
you'll get your bottom end saturated. You just want a very gradual drop and hopefully the water
runs out all the way down. There's no sludge comes through the drain field through the tank.
Like i mentioned before it's a two tank system so that the sludge stays in the first part of the
tank and all the liquid drains to the second part and that's what goes out into the leach field.
I put the drain rock in this second ditch but i couldn't get around to get it smoothed out .
I tried to put enough in there to cover the pipe so what i ended up doing was going around the
far end of the field and knocking down the berm and then i could drive on it with the backhoe
and scoop out the ditch line for the drain rock to go in. I took a pry bar that had a handle on it and
I made a tape mark at eight inches and then one at 12 so that when i put the pipe down i could keep
pushing it through the rock as far as the dirt to make sure i had the full eight inches of drain
rock underneath it and then the 12 inches over the top. The pipe had laid out in the field so it was,
not in the field but on a trailer, it had just a little bit of curve in it.
That's why i ended up going five feet increments instead of the full length of the pipe and that
way we can push the rock underneath the pipe so that it had a good solid base to sit on so when we
put the rock and the straw and the dirt over the top it didn't make it sink and get a belly
in it for the water to catch on once you get the rock all settled in and raked over fairly smooth.
Then the inspector wanted to come look at it and check for rock depth and fall in the pipe,
check the tank to make sure the tees are in each end of the tank for the sludge to flow in and
the water to flow out, and when he got done with that then we could go ahead and lay in the straw.
I don't know how a person would do this without a laser level because when
you use a string line once you got the pipe level then you'd be covering
up string the line with the rock. A laser level is about the only way that you can do it. Most of
the ditch I had pretty good, but the little pooch there didn't help much. Every time she went up
or down the bank she whould knock dirt into the ditch. You'll see here in a minute when I got
right down to the end i didn't have it dug deep enough so I had to take the rock out
and dig the dirt down a little bit further to get down to the end. Out at the end of your pipe you
also have to have a three foot space between the end of the pipe and the end of the ditch.
Anywhere there's pipe there has to be at least three feet of space on each side of it.
You need a couple of places along your pipe that are left open so the inspector can see those.
Digging the ditch it is a lot simpler if you can start right next to your d-box
and as you go down you have somebody come along with the receiver of the laser level so that you
know how deep you're getting. Here i am on the very end. I've gotta scoop the rock out
and take the dirt out another two or three inches so that it is down to get enough
rock underneath the pipe on the very end. See me there checking the tape measure to
make sure I was at three feet on each side of the pipe to the edge of the back of the ditch.
The inspector has been there, okayed everything
so I'm trying to clean up the top of the tank. You can see on the left hand side of this hole
where the top of the "T" for the inlet pipe sticks up--there's one just the same on the outlet side.
I could probably have man-handled the covers into place, but why do it when you've got something to make it easy.
I cut three pieces of plastic--one to put over each manhole cover and one to
put over the d-box just to kind of help keep the dirt out of them,
plus you know when you're getting there when you gotta dig them out.
i got a piece of paper to make a diagram so that in any event when we have to have the septic tank
pumped out or we have a problem why I've got some measurements--basically from trees two
points from two different places so I have a cross reference approximately where the d-box is,
the distance between it and the tank and the two lids on the tank. It's always nice to know where
things are if you have to dig them up. I did the same thing when I put in the water lines.
At all the junctions I measured across from the d-box over to the far drain field. The first
drain field just comes right straight out of i. t You can see a little white pipe sticking up on the
left-hand side of the plastic there--that's where the inlet is going to come in from the house. I
just went ahead and put an elbow and a "T" there so i knew where it was and got it away from the tanks.
When you do any digging or anything you're not bumping anything and accidentally getting dirt into the tank.
Now that it's all been inspected, we're laying a straw mat on top of the drain rock. You need enough
so that it will create some mat so it doesn't let the dirt go down into the drain rock and
fill up the space and ruin your field. You can use filter cloth for gardens or the type of stuff that you
put underneath road beds to hold it all together if you want. We started out i was gonna get some
small bales (of straw), but they were pretty expensive and then a good friend who is a rancher said he
had big square bales for 20 bucks a piece-- which the small bales were seven, so I went and got two
big square bales. That's why you see us run them in with the wheelbarrow and the backhoe. It took just
almost one full square bale for each drain field. They wanted about 10 inches of fluffy straw on top.
Then when you put your dirt on top to level out the field that makes a good
solid mat that the dirt won't go through. Nell was doing the one side with the wheelbarrow and then
i started on the other side. I had to go clear down to the end and drive all the way around and I brought
straw up in the bucket which would give me about 10 feet of straw then i would pull the dirt
in and cover the straw and i would go get another bucket of straw. In order to get into one section I
had there was a tamarack stump in the ground which I pulled out so I could drive around without taking
a chance on poking a hole in the tire. I tried to get most of the big chunks of the wood out of the
holes especially--they rot and you get another hole again. Here we have the two big bales on the
trailer loading some in the bucket to take around to the far end and start the other ditch line.
I tried to fill both ditches as I came along which gave me a little bit more room to maneuver in
filling them up--figured it was a little bit better to do it with the backhoe and try and do it with
the bucket. As i filled them in I tried not to drive over the pipe--either drive in the center
or on the outsides of the ditch line so it didn't pack in and get too solid on top of the pipe.
Trying to put the finishing touches on now--have a little ditch on the end for a water drain off the
bank going around. Rob's getting this all smoothed up. We plan on this being our berry patch and we'll
probably stick some flowers and who knows what all in here. If you're interested, in the description
down below I've listed other homesteaders who have also done their own septic system.