Transcription
Going back in time, this was our first sewer treatment uh device. This log—we went behind the log; it's at the far side of our little yard here. It's all I had. I mean, for the first six months I was coming here, we didn't have the cabin. And then I did get the cabin, but it only had 12 volts and it didn't have water. And then the cabin had water, and eventually we moved a 5-gallon bucket into the cabin bathroom. Um, so when I hooked up the holding tank, which originally was the old holding tank from the camper that I tore up, and the pump that was like so much better, but uh, my bride never was too crazy about pumping into the woods, so it was temporary. So when your bride doesn't like something, that's the same as being temporary. So now we're going to unemp it, and we're putting in our little um sewer system septic tank system.
Okay, I want to show you my existing sewer system. Start out with a tank that I made, which is an upgrade from the original black tank that came with the camper that I wrecked to get the camper frame to make the tiny house. So got a fiberglass tank, we got a valve, and we got a little Murator pump, 12vt—um, basically a marine pump for boats. And on the end of that, I have 80 ft of 1-in PVC pipe. Now I just came through here with the loppers and cut the vines so I could get through here with the camera, and I'll show you how we treat the sewer. We have a big giant 100-acre bioreactor here, and we let nature take care of it. Massera, the sewer is a big—a to quickly having it break down because it creates so much more surface area, so that's import—important part of this operation here. Okay, so 80 ft from our cabin is the end of the 1-in PVC pipe, and we pump our sewage right here, and we've been doing this for a year, I think—a year—and all you can tell is that there's a little black spot on the ground. Um, nature is able to decompose what we flush; however, we don't live here, we don't have a washer and dryer, and we don't have a bunch of kids, so mostly it's just one night or two nights a week, probably average. So treating the sewage to me is an—not an issue. Getting in here with the pump is a little bit more problematic, and that's why I'm making some changes. Um, so the pump can freeze in the winter, which always concerns me. The pipes have frozen in the winter and broken; they have clogged up and pushed themselves apart—part cuz I don't have them glued. Um, we have got products in the pump that shouldn't have been in the commode, when—sometimes when we have guests, they don't know better. And yeah, so the—so if it was me and my two sons, we could—we could baby this pump forever, I think. Sometimes you have to turn it off and on, let it run a little bit, and then let it burp a little bit, and then turn it on again. But if company were here, this is not a good situation. So that is why I'm putting an septic system over here, and that's the three tanks I built at home. They're going to go somewhere over here, in my leech field is going to run that way, right underneath the power lines where they're not going to be able to plant trees anyway. And luckily these are mostly pines, and pine tree roots are not as invasive in a leech field as some other types of trees. So that's what we're going to do. Um, these are really ready to go on the ground. I need to do some surveying to get some elevation, but not this weekend; this weekend we take down the dead tree that's over the tree house. Just picked up three of these drums, supposedly 55 gallons; I don't really know how accurate that is, but I got these because they have a removable plastic top, and sewer does not mess with plastic, so that should be fu—a forever top as long as I can keep the tractor from falling through it. And I need baffles. I'm getting ready to try to see if I can cut a 5-gallon bucket into baffles. I got lots and lots of five-gallon buckets from my wife's business. I'm going to cut—cut it here, and then I'm going to cut it here, and that—and then cut it into thirds. I think we'll see how that does; it should be a thermoplastic; I should be able to heat it up and shape it. I'm kind of counting on that.
All right, this is the elevation of the inlet and the outlet hole. Um, it's 2 and 1/2 in above this little crease to the center. Um, I did not want to drill that hole; I don't know why I drill that hole. I meant to drill a quarter-inch hole, but I didn't stop. This is what I wanted to do: I want to drill a 1/4-inch hole and flatten this plastic out, so—cuz this is going to go in here, and when I pull it tight, I don't want it to distort the rim, cuz I want to be able to put the top back on it. So I want to distort the plastic with the top in place. I'm going to try that. I'm going to—I'm going to heat this area up and tighten these two little pieces of plywood together and see if I can flatten that plastic out. But I can't do it now cuz I cut the hole too big over there, but I'll figure out something. So the blue plastic did get soft, and I did squish it a little bit, but this is not—not what I need to do. My little pieces of plywood need to be the OD here, not the OD here; they need to flatten this whole area out. So I'm going to cut two more pieces of plywood and do it again, and I'm doing it with the top latched into place to make sure I don't distort the top of the drum. Now this is a metal band; it won't last very many years underground, but uh, the weight will be on top of this pushing it down. There's a little rubber gasket; it should seal up pretty well, and I'll probably put a concrete uh ring, like a big round stepping stone over it, so when we cross it with the tractor or the riding mower or something, we don't have to worry about it collapsing. Well, the little plywood, it did flatten it out a little bit, put a little bump right there, but that really doesn't matter. But anyway, that's not nearly enough, so let's get to big plywoods and uh put them in there. Yeah, we got to flatten it a bunch.
So while you watch me heat this tank up really, really hot, I thought I would talk a little bit about septic tanks. They um use anaerobic bacteria—that's bacteria that can live without oxygen—and a mechanical process of the settlement. So the—your raw sewage comes in; the heavies will naturally sink to the bottom, and the floaties, which is like grease, will naturally float to the top, and the clean water—the clearer effluent—goes out. Now since these little homemade tanks are relatively small and they don't have a huge amount of detention time, you often see these little tanks um linked two at a time, so the second one can grab what the first one misses. And I elected to do three at a time, so I have three of them; I have a backup. So as uh—if—if the first one doesn't work and fills up with sludge, the second one has a chance to do it, and if not, the third one will get it. But all the material that goes into our tanks is almost 100% biodegradable; that means it's food for something—it's either something we ate and didn't eat anymore, so we flush it—so that's food—or it comes from the kitchen sink. Um, I guess there's—sometimes I wash my hands in the kitchen sink, so if there's like dirt, that's not biodegradable, and that will settle out and will stay forever. Um, we don't have a washing machine, and that's a big contributor, cuz uh, all those nylon and rayon and polyester shirts that get thinner with time in the washing machine—all those fibers end up in a septic tank, and they're not degradable. So uh, plus the dirt that comes off of clothes—all that in there. So if I can keep dirt from the tank and keep my little critters happy with—by not flushing chemicals uh like Clorox or, you know, drain cleaner or anything like that in the drain, the bugs will be happy. Um, they have a lot of time to—to decompose the material because most of the time nobody's there. So most of the time these tanks will sit idle, and the bo—will consume the solids, turn them into various noxious gases—the main one being methane, but also hydrogen sulfide—that's the rotten egg smell that you get sometimes—and different kind of acids, and it's just—it's a complicated system. There's no one bug; there's a whole series of anaerobic bugs, and one thing about them is they don't affect plastic. So we made our tanks out of plastic.
Okie dokie. Oh, cool. Pulled it down with a wet rag; it was pretty hot, and the top came off with no problem. So let's unscrew this little plug and see how flat it stays. I think it's cool enough now where it's not going to deform after I let the pressure off. Success! We have a flat spot, and I can still get the top on. Now I can drill the big hole—not before. Let's see if we can figure out this other problem I got. Okay, easy solution. I screwed the uh one of the blocks I made on accident that are too small; this will center it in the hole, pretty dang close to center, and I'm just going to put a little bitty nail top and bottom to hold it kind of centered, and when I squish it, these nails should go all the way through. I don't think that's going to be a problem. All right, so the middle plywood is nailed into place. So now—now I'm going to do a little preheat, and then we'll slide the outside ply—water on loosely, do some more preheat. Oh, I need to put the top one—for—do this right now. On a scale of 1 to 10, it is pretty freaking hot; it will burn your fingers if you touch it. Trying to get it to the shiny stage where it looks like the surface—it's kind of melting like right there—and we're going to tighten it up. Right now it is very, very, very—whoa, got some smoke going on there. All right, let's see what we can do. Hopefully the—so now we are squishing the two pieces of plywood together in a tightly manner, and we have contact all the way around—well, most of the way around. Sorry about the phone shaking; I'm trying to work. All right, now it's as hot as—bbies; we're going to leave it alone for a little while, maybe till tomorrow. [Applause] [Music]
Took a 5-gallon bucket, of which I have many—we have many, cuz my wife's products come in these buckets—and I cut off the bottom right here, and I cut off the top right here, and I took the remainder and cut it into thirds and bent these little flanges, and this is to go in inside the tank as a baffle on both sides of the inlet and the outlet, because we don't want the scum to go with the flow; we want the scum to stay put—scum layer. But it's a little bit too small, so I'm going to do it again. And this radius was 11 in; I think that was the most I could get divided into thirds. I think I'm going to go maybe 13 in, so I only be able to get two at each bucket, but that doesn't matter. So I'm going to cut—I'm going to cut another bucket up and get two more and try to get to bend a little better. And I bent these over—bent these flanges, so I'm going to try to not bend the new flanges quite so much. So I just cut my first bottom—the bottom got launched by the blade; it's out there in the yard. Um, yeah, that wasn't the best. I know to keep my—never stand in front of the blade, so no harm, no foul, but uh, yeah, it was kind of scary. [Music] [Music] for [Music] [Music] the little 4x4 by the rip fence reduces kickback because it makes it less likely the—the um plastic will get caught between the blade and the [Music] fence. Sweet! Is [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] Compared to the plastic in the blue 5G barrels, this uh plastic from the little white buckets melts almost instantly—really fast. It'll melt so much that after I clamp it, it—it looks like Play-Doh. Anyway, the board um closest to the camera, I cut a bevel on because the first ones I bent, they were overbent, and I didn't want to be that far, so I cut a bevel on it and uh clamp it, let it cool for a second, and it worked out pretty good. And actually, not only does it melt quicker than the blue barrels, but it cools down quicker because there's just not so much uh mass holding the heat. So pretty much do these, clamp them, you know, get a sip of water and unclamp them and swap them around and do the other side. This worked uh probably better than I was guessing in the beginning. With these headlines, Israel's military has announced a daily daytime pause. And it is typical for my projects; I didn't really measure anything; I just wanted that little flange to be big enough to hold a screw and some caul—about an inch, maybe a little more. So uh, after the first side is set, flip it over—flip it—pick it up—flip it around and clamp it and melt the next flange. Okay, we do it again. So I bought some 316 stainless steel self-drilling self-tapping screws, and I'm using some urethane caul that I think will hold up pretty well, and—and cocked and screwed everything together. Um, when I was done, I put some sealer over the screws that protruded—protruded into the tank, just in case the acidic uh wants to mess with the stainless steel, but I don't think it will. And with my um blue tank flat spots, the—the flanes fit on there really good, and I think that's important. You see a lot of people make these little tanks or—or try to make some kind of tank, and they don't have a good seal between the influent and influent pipes in the tank, and if you have a leak, what's going to happen, in my opinion, is rainwater is going to dribble in there every time it rains, and when rainwater dribbles, it brings in silt, and um you're going to have—one—you're going to develop a sinkhole in the yard, and two—all that silts going in the tank, and it is not biodegradable, so you're going prematurely uh fill up the bottom of your tank with sludge. So I think it's really important to have this um—and—well, all the pipe fittings to be 100% waterproof, and I have no—no doubt that these are all right. That's six—all six—I'm—are installed. I got to grind them—I got to grind the heads of the screws off cuz they were too long, but that's okay. And right now I'm soaking the uh baffles; I'm trying to get the stickers off. I just thought I'd stick them in some water for a little while; hope that'll work. So again, these are scum baffles; these are to—one—keep the influent water from breaking up the scum blanket and having it mix up again, because the object here is to separate everything, and two—to keep the scum from going out the um effluent pipe, because you don't want it in your uh—in your leech field; you don't want to clog up all your gravel with—with scum. Um, you need to leave it in the tank and let it degrade; it will—not as fast as some of the other products in the tank, but it is degradable; even grease will go away eventually. So uh, yeah, it needs to stay in the tank and not in the leech field. So that's what these little baffles do. A lot of people use uh a T-fitting of schedule 40 PVC—looking up and down—and I guess that works. Um, they're 15 bucks; plastic buckets cost me nothing, so I was pretty happy with the way we did it, and um, yeah, again, these are the 316 stainless self-drilling self-tapping screws. I do have holes pre-drilled in the white plastic just to make it a little easier for my shaky hands to get the screw started, and uh, yeah, they went in there pretty quick—no problem. So in the end, I'm not sure what caused it, but I think when I screwed on the baffles, the—the tanks did get a little egg-shaped, and it made it kind of challenging to put the top on by myself, cuz I could hold the top down, but I couldn't operate the clamp with one hand, so I let go the cop, and it popped off. Anyway, solved it with a little weight here—just need to weight it down, and then I get to—
So yesterday I made up some forms for the concrete tops for the three little septic tanks. Um, round would have been the most efficient use of concrete cuz the tops are round; square would have been the easiest to form, but used extra concrete and just made them heavier, so compromised—made them eight-sided. I got some little rebar mats ready to drop into place, and I'm going to put some rope through the middle of the form so that uh be able to hand all these things would the tracko—well, not here; I'm going to have to pick them up, put them in the truck; they're not going to be—they should weigh about 85 lbs—not terrible—but once we get there, I can handle them with the tracko, which is always uh better than lifting up by hand. So we're going to put the ropes in, bring them out, put them on some plastic, and mix—I got some easy-cre concrete—we're going to pour them this morning. All right, another—well, I—okay—day later, I got all the screws out but one—let's just—let's knock these apart. I did run a little bit shy of—of concrete, so I just lowered the elevation in each one about a quarter of an inch, so we'll be all right. And all this lumber goes right next door to the burn pile.
Today is the day we dig the hole for the treatment uh—what do you call these little septic tanks—little baby septic tanks. And I did some head scratching. Um, I want my sewer pipe to be at least an inch below the dirt right here at the bottom of this ditch, and this ditch is probably going to get filled in some cuz it's now irrelevant; water used to run through the woods here like crazy, and during a storm it would wash up under the teeny house, but since I dug a bypass ditch, we get like—not coming through here. So I'm going to dig up all these stones because they keep me from running the mower up in here—remove all these stones and just grade this out. But anyway, it's neither here nor there. I want the sewer pipe to be an inch below the grass in the bottom of this ditch; it's probably going to conflict with this 2-in—this is the—the pipe that I catch the rainwater that comes off the roof, and it goes underground, and it comes up right here, and it dumps into the tank. I don't get a lot of water off of that one, but I get enough to keep it—if it's a conflict, this can—I can roll this up with a couple of 45s and get up higher. This doesn't have to be on any particular grade because this is a sir-charged loop; it's—it's always full of water; it's probably full of water right now. Um, so knowing that I want the pipe an inch below the dirt and leveling across here with my little line level, and this is 7 ft, so a 1/4 inch a foot, I want it to be like 2 in lower here. Um, it means I need to go down 26 in below this string to the top of this right here; that's going to—I think—work out pretty good; that's going to be like a 3-ft deep hole, and I'm going to have like 4 in of coverage on the top if I keep the grade the same. So yeah, I don't—I don't know what else to do but start digging. Go get the tracko; I got some fuel for it; I need to grease it, and we're going to dig a hole—pretty good size—little hole.
So I don't know about you guys, but I find that my hindsight is getting better every year that I'm still on the face of this Earth; I hardly miss anything thinking about it going backwards. So one of the things that my hindsight brought to my attention is I wish on the first tank I would have put the effluent line about an inch lower than the influent line. So keep in mind the influent line is coming right out of the toilet, so it's got solids and it's got liquids, and they're not necessarily mixed together, and they're probably not mixed together. So the solids are going to poke along a little slower than the liquids, and there's a chance that they could settle and not get into the tank—just stop at the—at the influent pipe right where the water dumps into the tank. I don't know this, but I'm thinking it might happen because the water level would be right there because the effluent—the effluent is the same elevation as the influent. So uh, yeah, I kind of wish I would have had different elevations on that first tank. So what I did was I just sloped the bottom of my hole, so the tank has sloped—so uh—same effect; the effluent pipe is now going to be lower than the influent pipe, and that's the same with all three tanks cuz I just sloped the whole bottom of the whole excavation, and I think that's going to work out fine. Um, yeah, but uh, that old hindsight, man—it's getting sharper every year. Well, the ground is pretty hard, so this might take a while. I don't think it's going to be really difficult, but uh, my little hoe just doesn't have enough weight to really dig down in there and grab a big old bucket full at one time. [Music] [Music] Believe—oh, no—no—no—no! I'm not deep enough! I got another foot—another foot to—okay, depthwise, I'm pretty much where I want to be. I want to dig another couple inches so I can put some sand in the bottom to kind of level it up. I want to square up this corner, and uh—shoot, that wasn't bad at all—and go ahead and dig it out for all three of them, and then we might actually start putting some glue on some of these fittings.
So if you were ever wondering what a perfect excavation looks like, look no further; this is it. Sides are square; it has a little slope to the discharge. In—I brought some sand with me from the house; I'm level the bottom with sand—well, I'm gonna put a slope on the bottom, but I'm gonna use sand. Yeah, it's awesome. Now I wonder if I can get out. I bought six buckets of sand from my house cuz I got a load of sand at home; I wish I would have bought twice as much. For—okay, so we have a sand bed; it's 2 or 3 inches thick, and it is perfectly sloped. I got down there on my hands and knees with the 4-ft level and screed it like I was screeding concrete. Dropped the first drum in here, and it is 272 inches below the string; we're shooting for 26; I'm going to call that perfect. So I'm ready to set the other two drums except for the two drums of glue I had here are both bad, so—that—I hate to spend this precious cool hour in the morning driving down the road to get some more glue. I think I'm going to go get the water barrel and see if the um generator will start and fill up the water barrel with tank with water; it'll hold 250 gallons, so I'm going to need 150 basically to fill these three drums up. Let's do that before the sun starts hammering; I'm in the shade here. Once the sun comes up, I will uh get in the truck and drive to um the closest Lowe's. Well, the Jer has been sitting for a few months out in the weather, but uh, it did start, and it is pumping, and we are filling up—I elected—
To put a flexible joint between the tanks, not sure why. I mean, the tanks themselves are very flexible; probably was not necessary. I probably could have just glued them all together, but uh, I did, and no regrets. It does make it easier if you have to go back and fix something, be able to get the tank out, get it cut loose. Although digging these things up would be a pain; I'd have to dig a huge hole to be able to get the tanks out of the ground.
Filling the tanks with water is really important. Um, for one thing, these are big giant corks, and if I get any rain, they'd want to pop out of the ground, whether they were glued together or not. And another thing is they would crush uh, when I backfill with all the dirt if they didn't have something on the inside of them pushing out. So a year from now, when the dirt around them is super compact, I'll be able to empty them without worrying about them crushing. But when you're throwing in all this loose dirt in the hole, uh, yeah, you need, you got to have water in them; that's just the right way to do it.
And there's some YouTube guys that using are using the totes as uh, septic tanks; that's the square tank like I have my water tank. And for the life of me, I can't see that working. I can't see a square tank, very thin wall, square tank holding up underground. I know you can fill it with water, but you don't fill it to the top, and I don't know what's going to hold up the big flat top against ground pressure or l or anything. So uh, they, they other videos, they have the advantage is they're super cheap and they hold 250 gallons, but uh, yeah, I, I just don't see them lasting very long. I mean, it's easy to make a video putting it in the ground, but what happens after the fact? Nobody knows.
Because the connection, the two nipples in the rubber hub, um, spaced the tanks out a little more than I had originally had them laying on the ground. I had to dig out a few more inches here, and I did it with a shovel, and it was in close quarters, but uh, we did it, and now everything's in there, and everything is looking pretty good right now. So I have to put that last coupling in there. I need to tape the effluent end shut to keep dirt from getting in there, and the same with the influent end. Um, actually, I think by this time the influent in is taped up, but I'll need to tape that influent shut; we don't want any dirt getting in there right off the get-go, cuz it will never come out all by itself.
Okay, now the tanks are in, all hooked up; they all have good fall. Wasn't as easy as I thought it was going to be. I made these nipples to go between the rubber and the flange adapter a little long, which pushed out that last tank. So I ended up digging by hand the last 6 inches, which wasn't fun, but we did it, and uh, yeah, now they're all good. Took some, it took some play in; they didn't automatically end up with good slope, but now they have good slope. So I should be able to just keep filling up this one, which will fill the next one, which will fill up the next one. And having water in them will keep them from wanting to float out if they get water in the hole and keep them from collapsing when I start backfilling, cuz there'll be a lot of pressure on these things. Fill, baby, fill; easy peasy.
Then I'm going to have a lot of shoveling to do, cuz I really can't do this with the machine, the backfill. Then it's going to settle like crazy cuz it's going to be very uncompacted, but we'll just uh, pile it up a little high, and then uh, deal with it after a few rains when it settles down. Got water running out the third tank, so we're full; all three of them are full. I'm going to backfill these; I'm going to put the lids on them, and I may never take the lids off again, hopefully in my lifetime. It should uh, it should last for a long, long time. [Music] [Music] Okay, so the third tank, I need to clean it out a little bit and tape that um, discharge thing shut; it's still open; it's going to get some dirt in it, and put the stone over the top and uh, put a lot of dirt on it, cuz it's going to settle a whole bunch.
So the septic tank build and install is done. I to do a Lee leech field, leash, bleach field out that way, and I have to run the influent line back toward the cabin. I might do one of these tomorrow morning when it's nice in the morning, when this is in the shade. Um, right now it's pretty unbearable, but yeah, so I'll wrap up this video, and I'll probably have at least one, maybe two more on setting up this little septic system.