Home Guru
If your house is on sewer, you may think septic systems have no application to you. But as I understand it, as many as one-third of us within the reach of this newspaper are on septic. And if you’re not, you may someday fall in love with a house that is, like I did.
When I recently started a home search for new clients, my first directive was, “Don’t show us anything that isn’t on sewer.” And yet, the couple preferred homes with privacy in more remote locations where, more often than not, there are no sewer lines.
As I become more a veteran in the real estate business, I tend more to gently nudge clients if I feel it’s for their own good. So, in response to that preference, I asked, “Why not? A septic system is not something to fear.”
The fact that my own 18th century house still had an abandoned outhouse in the yard when we first visited it should have led me to ask where the doo-doo went. But at the time, as such a young and naive kid who knew little about the way houses work, I never bothered to ask whether it was on septic or sewer.
Once ensconced in our new home, we soon noticed that the sinks and showers were draining slowly and that the toilet wasn’t flushing properly. That’s when I realized that we probably had a septic tank that needed to be pumped. When the service people arrived, my wife and I were at first somewhat startled by the slogan on their lime green t-shirts that said, “Your s— is our bread and butter!” We laughed nervously as city transplants to “deep country,” at the time when the film “Deliverance” had just been released.
But after much poking around, they found a wonderfully built septic system. From what they could tell, it probably hadn’t been pumped in a very long time. Once the tank was pumped to remove the sludge on the bottom and the scum from the top, we never had a problem. The only maintenance we do, when we remember, is to pump it every five years to keep it in top working condition.
Now Westchester County requires that septics be pumped every three years, soon to be upgraded to two years, but one septic expert told me it’s not necessary to pump that often, suggesting that the county boosts tax revenue this way. Who knows?
The septic tank comes to us courtesy of a French inventor named John Mouras around 1860. The components he established then are still pretty much used today: the house drain connects to the septic tank where all wastes either settle or float. Heavy solids sink to the bottom where they are broken down by bacteria to form sludge, while the lighter solids rise to the surface as scum. This process allows the wastewater in between to be released to the absorption field.
To show the efficacy of a good septic system, I have been involved with the sale of a Frank Lloyd Wright tutored home that was built in 1962. When it came time to check the septic tank, we couldn’t find it. The testing service came over, poked and prodded for a long time, working off of an old survey. It was no place to be found.
So we called in Andy Sabo of Cheap Snake who had to place a snake with a camera down the waste pipe and he shoved it through quite a distance to the tank. Then he took a “locator” to connect with the frequency of the camera and, at last, we found the tank in a very unlikely location–next to a tree that certainly wasn’t there 50 years ago. When the lid was lifted, maybe for the first time in a quarter of a century, the tank was clean with a minimum of sludge and practically no scum on top. When things work, they work.
Anyone who needs any kind of pipe snaked can enlist the expertise of Cheap Snake at 914-962-1641.
Bill Primavera is a residential and commercial realtor® associated with Coldwell Banker, as well as a marketer and journalist who writes regularly as The Home Guru. For questions about home maintenance or to engage him to help you buy or sell a home, he can be emailed at Bill@TheHomeGuru.com or called directly at 914-522-2076.
