"Chris Hogg" wrote in message
...
What you need is a septic tank. You pay for the water you use, in the
usual way, but not for its disposal, so total payments are roughly
halved compared to normal. And in the extreme, you have a source of
nutritious but smelly water for the garden if things get really
desperate. Not that I ever needed to use mine for that, and I wouldn't
recommend it for the veg garden!

That assumes you have access to the outflow from the septic tank, and a way
of pumping the water uphill from underground to above ground level to the
garden. I presume the treated water from septic tanks usually goes into a
soakaway somewhere nearby, without ever being accessible by the user. And
the solid material, minus the majority of the water, is pumped out every few
years. (*)

That reminds me of a very funny situation at my parents' holiday cottage in
the Yorkshire Dales. When they bought it in the mid-70s, there was a septic
tank under the drive, but also a big open-topped breezeblock-lined chamber
buried in the back garden. Now the garden is about 10 feet higher than the
house. Apparently (according to neighbours) the estate which owns/owned a
lot of the houses in the surrounding village dug the pit in the back garden,
lined it with breezeblocks and laid the 4" sewer pipe from there to the
bathroom. Only to discover that the outlet into the cess pit was slightly
*higher* than the loo. **** doesn't flow uphill, and if by some miracle it
*did* manage to find its way in there, it would all siphon back out through
the loo once the tank was full. Hence the replacement septic tank at a lower
level under the drive.

Sounds like a story reminiscent of Blaster Bates' "shower of ****" tale.


The unfinished septic tank came in very useful as a general dumping ground
for old storage heaters, rubble from old plaster, and all the other things
from the badly-modernised cottage that we had to strip out to make it
habitable. A local farmer was happy to finish off the job of levelling the
ground with his JCB afterwards for a few beer tokens. But if an
archaeologist ever digs round there in a few centuries, he'll wonder why
people dug a big hole in the ground, lined it with concrete blocks and then
used it as a rubbish dump.


(*) What are the current rules about what is and isn't recommended to go
into a septic tank? I'd understood that you needed to minimise the amount of
water, so rainwater and grey water (bath, washing machine, washing up) had
to go into soakaway. But two plumbers have said that bathwater should really
go into the septic tank, rather than the communal land drain soakaway for
the village. Wouldn't that tend to overwhelm the septic tank and prevent the
rotting of the sewage from taking place?