Assuming a septic system is designed properly, it shouldn’t have any real disposal problems for 20 to 25 years provided the system is not overloaded beyond its design capacity and your septic tank is periodically “serviced”. Service means pump it on a regular basis.
The conventional, anaerobic septic tank is basically a filter for the disposal field. Its purpose is to retain 70 to 90 percent of the organic load, the “solid stuff” you put into the tank. It does this by a minimum retention time that has little movement (except when you add new stuff) of the liquid into and out of the septic tank.
Intestinal bacteria continue to survive in the tank and while in there, they secrete enzymes that break apart the solids at the molecular level allowing non floating solids to sink to the bottom forming sludge and the floatable solids to rise to the surface of the effluent as scum.
The resultant “clarified” effluent then leaves the tank, still “nasty” with some suspended solids and intestinal bacteria, and ends up in the disposal field there to be absorbed into the soil for final treatment.
The intestinal bacteria will ultimately cause the disposal field to fail through biomat clogging of the soil.
If you don’t periodically pump out the accumulated solids in the septic tank, the retention time needed for this “filtration” by sequestration to happen, is reduced by the ever growing layers of sludge and scum. These solids take up volume that would otherwise be liquid. This reduced retention time causes the clarified effluent to contain a greater concentration of non-settled or separated solids and intestinal bacteria.
These addtitional solids and intestinal bacteria then inappropriately leave the septic tank and end up in the disposal field to cause premature disposal field failure. This is why you must pump an anaerobic conventional septic tank.
The current thought in the septic industry is pumping should be done no less often than three years and no more than five years
When you have your tank pumped, have the pumper check your tank to see the amount of solids build up. That is the key. Six to eight inches of scum or floating solids is the max you want in the tank.
Do not put any bacteria or enzyme amendments into the septic tank that claim to reduce pumping. They will. These products short circuit the filtering aspects of the conventional septic tank by solubolizing the filtered and stored solids and sending them out to the disposal field to cause premature failure just like I described above.
The Septic Genie will reduce the need to pump your septic tank to near zero while keeping your disposal field from failure. The Genie uses bacteria to accomplish this but they are grown in an incubator (Genie) continuously operating in the septic tank and daily sending out countless numbers of these bacteria to the disposal field to keep the soils open and functional. Do not make the mistake of comparing what the Septic Genie does with bacteria vis a vis these amendments.
