this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
104 points (92.6% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26890 readers
2041 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

And if you somehow disagree with flushing it down if it is brown, I suppose I would like to hear about that as well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 75 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

Always flush. I have a septic tank and if you don't make sure to run some minimum amount of water into it, it'll get crusty and start to have clog problems. As long as we're running water though it's great for 8-10 years between pumps.
Better to just run more water when possible.

Also it's nasty if someone goes to take a dump and there's piss chilling in there. If you get hit with Posideon's kiss it's gonna be double nasty. So you flush it before doing your business and now the net effect is zero anyway, wasting the effort. Blech.

[–] bitwaba@lemmy.world 15 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Posideon's kiss

I believe at that point it's Pissideon's kiss.

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 months ago

well, considering Poseidon lives in the ocean, it'd track that he'd have a kink for getting "wet and wild"

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

8-10 years between pump... As in emptying it or as in replacing the pump? Because if it's the former then that's way longer than it should!

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

yes, 8-10yr between emptying it. It's a fairly large tank (1800gal iirc?) for a small family. The last time we had it done the local guy said it looked great and there weren't any problems. so something must be working right.

however a rental with a smaller tank constantly had problems with clogging. find out tenant was from california and brought all their water saving fixtures with them and took military style showers so the tank never got any real thru-flow. plus was a very heavy tp user... yeah. gotta have water moving, put original fixtures on and told them to start throwing their tp in a trash can. no problems since.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Septic tanks should be emptied every two years, the tank might look great, it's your drain field that will be ruined way more quickly. People not draining their tank often enough is the reason why municipalities have started just adding it to their taxes and taking care of it themselves instead of letting people contaminate their lot.

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

yeah that was probably true 30-40 years ago when small tanks without baffles and straight outlet pipes were common. if you have an old property that hasn't had the tank replaced, do that. but these days bigger tanks have baffle separators between settling compartments, an output baffle, and a strainer on the output. you almost never get any solids going out to the leech field unless the strainer collapses and the input will clog long before that is likely to happen.

[–] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you have to throw your toilet paper in the trash instead of flushing it in order to not have issues then yeah, you're not emptying it often enough.

But hey, you do you and you deal with the issues, I mean, what's a new septic system when you can save the equivalent of 100$ a year, right?

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 8 months ago

We don't put tp in the trash at our family home and have no problems.
The rental unit has to because of the smaller tank (it has a ~900gal one or something) and it normally gets emptied on a 3 year cycle- as it had been for about 10 years without issue before this tenant moved in and problems arose because of their copious TP usage.

Thanks for the advice though 👍

[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I have a friend with a septic tank, the system is old, probably long overdue for some kind of serious maintenance or replacement that they've been putting off because the town is doing some big expansion of the sewer lines and their street is supposed to be on the list for it and they intend to get hooked up to it, but no one seems to know quite when that's coming. Their property also generally has some weird drainage issues and is sort of in a semi-wetland area, so their septic tank sometimes has a hard time dealing with things when we get a lot of rain, so they have to have a let it mellow policy sometimes depending on the weather. Most of the time the guys will just opt to go find a tree in the back yard.

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah drain field saturation is a pain in the dick when in an area with high water table or very claey soils. We're lucky as our volcanic soil is coarse and just sucks water away so drain field problems are basically nonexistent.

Hope they get hooked up to city sewer. Sounds like their local area and well water quality would greatly benefit.