Transcription
In the last video, I showed I picked up three plastic drums with plastic, removable tops. I've flattened out a spot on both sides so that these flanges would fit without leaking, and I put some plastic baffles in place to, uh, make sure that the influent from a commode flush would not upset the scum layer on top. You want to keep that in place, and I poured through three little concrete stones to protect these plastic lids, cuz they're not very strong. They will resist the sewer and the sewer gases, but not the, uh, weight of the soil and and/or tractors and lawnmowers.
Then we went out to the country; we dug a hole, we shot some elevations, and we hooked up the three tanks in series and backfilled them. In this video, we're going to start from the effluent, the discharge side of the last tank, and, uh, we're going to put in a leech field. I'm going to install, with two exceptions, a standard leech field. It's just, uh, it's a gravel; it's a perforated pipe buried in gravel so that the water can come out of the pipe and go through the gravel into the soil. And it's not just a way to get rid of water; it's also a treatment. There's aerobic bacteria in the soil, and it, uh, filters out all kinds of bad things. You know, of course, assuming it's working right, it'll break down organic compounds, nitrogen compounds, ammonia, nitrates, phosphorus, and other nutrients are absorbed, and yeah, it just makes everything more better.
Last video, we ended with the three tanks installed and hooked up and backfilled, and I left a 4x2x6 sticking out of the ground where I need to tie into it. Starting this video, I always try to put a vertical board on the end of the pipe so when I come back with the trackhoe or with a shovel or whatever to dig, I know if I stay on the back side of that board, I'm not going to snatch the pipe and break it or crush it or rip it out of the ground. There are codes, ordinances, laws, rules, uh, you name it, regulations on sizing and location of putting in a, uh, a gravel bed for sewage disposal. I didn't follow any of those. What I did was look at where I have to work, and I have an 80-foot stretch under the power lines, which is good cuz trees can't grow under the power lines, and, uh, said that's good enough. So I went to Home Depot to get 80 feet of pipe, and he only had, uh, six joints, 60 feet. So I purchased those six joints of pipe, 60 feet. If I make my gravel bed 3 feet wide and 1 foot deep, that's 180 cubic feet, and a 1 cubic foot holds 7.48 gallons of water, so that's 1350 gallons that that gravel bed could theoretically displace, except for the fact that it's full of gravel. So gravel takes up—and it varies depending on what kind of gravel you have—but I'm judging from what I can find on the internet, it's going to take up 2/3 of the volume, so that 1346 turns into 471 gallons of water squeezed between the gravel, the little gravels.
Um, last summer we had a drought, and I started out with 200 gallons of water, and I used less than 100 gallons in 2 months. So I said, man, this is good enough; this is enough. So, um, plus the pipe itself holds about 40 gallons, so yeah, I'm good with 60 feet of gravel bed, uh, leech field, and that's what we're going to do. So there's my taped-up effluent pipe. I'm going to dig it up, and I'm going to add one or two joints. Um, I'm going to do something a little different, but I got to dig it up first. So this is my effluent line coming off of the little septic tanks, and obviously the cap is temporary, but I'm going to put a riser because I want to be able to look and see what's happening on the downstream side of my septic tank. I'm just curious to see, uh, how much suspended solids, how clear the water is. So I'll, uh, this will be cut below grade and put a cap on it, some kind of cover to protect it, and out this way will be our 60 feet of the perforated pipe with a lot of stone, and it's going to be a huge excavation, cuz that's the top; I need to go down below that, so it's going to be a bunch of digging. But I've been sitting two weeks; haven't done anything because my laser level is dead; it's the receiver. Um, the new ones are like almost 300 bucks for a new one, and the machine is probably 25 years old. I'm hesitant to invest money in a 25-year-old piece of electronic gear. So anyway, been working with it, uh, my friend who's still in construction, he thinks he can find me a secondhand one, so and then we'll get back to work and get back to digging. I can't—this is something you can't really guess at; you need an instrument to tell whether you're going uphill or downhill. A 4-foot level is kind of useless when you're going 60 feet.
So here I've cut off the extra vertical sticking out of the ground, cut it closer to ground level, threw a bucket over it to keep dirt out of it, and I've laid that horizontally in the ground. That's not perforated pipe; it's regular pipe. So, uh, gets me a little bit closer to that telephone pole before I start digging the deeper trench for the gravel. It is in; it's glued, and it has some fall. Cap's not glued, obviously. So throw a little dirt on it, and then I'm going to lay out my perforated pipe, get my upside-down paint and paint my trench and go do some math and see how big I need to make the trench. Okay, I have laid out my discharge. Um, I'm going to start with a 22 and 1/2 because my trench was going to be kind of close to my new power pole, and I didn't want any issues with the power company. So this is my 60 feet of pipe; I got it all stretched out on the ground. Typically, I would not like to dig part of the hole, part of the depth and come back and finish the depth, um, just not a good plan, especially in the South, cuz the hole can fill up with water and you have a mud hole on your hands. But this is a lot of material to move with this little trackhoe. Um, I bet the hole is going to be, I don't know, 4 feet deep all the way. So I'm going to dig it partial. I'm in the shade; make use of some shade before the sun comes up, and when I get the instrument, I'll be able to finish it off. I think I could to straddle the hole, so we're going to start digging. It's going to be pretty boring; it's going to be a lot to dig; the ground's very hard. But, uh, yeah, I'm going to have to swap this 45 for another 22 and a half, but that's no biggie. And this is it, 60 feet. [Music] Okay, I am at roughly the invert of my pipe now. This pipe is going to go downhill, not much, but a little bit, and my gravel is going to be at least a foot deep, so pretty comfortable. I'm going to dig this deep all the way; it's about a bucket deep. Um, I was digging it a little wider, but I think since I got to straddle it when I come back to finish digging, I'll just keep it a bucket wide. When I come back with the instrument and do final depth, I'll shave the sides a little bit and make it just a little bit wider. Yeah, this is this is going okay; it's not going to take that long. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
All right, I'm back to the country, and today is the day we're going to put in the gravel. Um, it's been a couple of weeks and a half. Uh, it took me a while to get my filter fabric because I found out if you order from Home Depot online and you don't hit that complete order button, it takes them a long time to ship. I.E., they don't ship. So I lost a week there. Um, it took me a few days to get my hands on a secondhand receiver for my antique Topcon. Um, thank you, Paul; he found one for me. And it's been raining almost every day for a long time, so there's a lot of water in the trench. Um, if we had a better perk system, it would all have gone into the ground. You can see where it's dropped, I don't know, an inch and a half, and we had rain yesterday, so it does go into the ground; it's just kind of slow. And I guess with all the rain it was saturated. So I'm going to try to track myself down here without falling in the hole and, uh, scoop out all this water and throw it in the ditch. So I don't want to mix the water with the dirt and turn it into slop and try to keep it as separated as possible. I'll make a confession—I've made lots of confessions on this, uh, series—but, um, I don't normally wear my seat belt on my mini-hoe. I should, but I don't. But when I'm in a situation like this, on the edge of a ditch or in this case, the very edge of a ditch, I put it on, cuz if the track falls in the hole, it's really easy to whack your head on on a roll cage or worst-case scenario, if you if you fall out and the machine falls on top of you, um, it turns the incident into a tragedy. So I got my seat belt on pretty much the whole time I'm doing this stuff. And unfortunately, the only place I have to put the water is in that ditch, and that's the ditch I have to drive through with the green tractor to bring the gravel to me. So I ended up with a big old muddy mess by the end of the day. [Music] Is for all right, we're not off to a very good start. My laser quit spinning, which means one, it got bumped, but I don't think it did, or two, the batteries did. Let's see. Well, we're struggling here. My laser, uh, moves, so when it moves, it turns itself off, so you don't make terrible mistakes, but it didn't move enough that I could tell, and now my receiver won't turn on. Oh, the battery fell out. Oh, oh, I got to find the battery. Oh boy, that's going to be a challenge. I think I have some in the cabin though. The little cover for the battery, I don't have a screw for it, so I can't, uh, but I could duct tape it. Look at what I found; I found the battery. Oh, that's lucky. Dug up my influent pipe to the the leech field, which is the effluent pipe for the, uh, septic tanks, and this is where the perforated pipe's going to start, and I've arbitrarily picked a foot deep. I want a foot of gravel, so I need to go a foot below the invert of this pipe. Um, so I've got my machine spinning over there. Let's see what we can do, my shaky self. Okay, got to turn this on. Okay, here, like the hole. I'm on my invert; this is my invert right here. I V, yeah, I want to I want to dig out a foot, so I need to raise the machine, raise the—right here, I should be shooting the foot, and I want to go down an inch and a half every foot; inch and a half every 10-foot joint. You know, it could be perfectly level, but then most of the water would drain on this end; it could have a slope, but I don't want the water to run to the other end, so I just arbitrarily picked an inch and a half. So that's one, two, three, four, five, six; one, two, three, four, five, six. Okay, now stumbling around like a drunk man. Okay, got the battery in; got the cover back on, which I couldn't get on earlier, but now it's on, and it looks like I'm about two or three inches deep, which is okay. All right, so now I'm going to actually start digging. I got something established; I'm going to go backwards. I'm really precarious here; I'll be glad when I get around this. A little bit of turn, oh, and I want 3 feet wide, and I'm right there. All I have to do is scrape the, uh, sides a little bit, and I get my 3 feet in width. So when I made that last little turn, the bank started giving away, so it's inevitable now; it's it's going to fail on me; it's just a matter of time. So this looks a little jerky in three times speed, but I'm trying to be as smooth an operator as I can be. I'm not trying to get too much dirt; I'm not trying to, uh, go too fast; I'm just trying to be smooth, but it, uh, it's to no avail; I'm going in. Okay, so I'm good up to this little stick; I'm going to go a little bit further. I am falling in a hole, so it's getting—I got to do something—but, uh, yeah, pretty soon I'm going to lower the the, uh, rod an inch and a half, and we'll keep on digging.
So I set out some pin flags at 10-foot intervals, and I marked them, uh, 1 through 6. So every time I get to one of these pin flags, I need to raise the receiver, uh, an inch and a half, which will make the bottom of the ditch go down an inch and a half, and it's not going to be probably that accurate, but order of magnitude, this is what we want. I got my little flags set; I got the level running; I'm wearing my seat belt cuz I am kind of precarious here. Uh, we start digging; it's going to be awkward with just me; I'm going to have to keep jumping out and shooting, uh, shots, but, uh, it's the way it is. Let's start. So right now would not be a good time to spin the machine around with the counterweight on the failing earth side. Um, makes it heavier on that side and wouldn't be able to stop myself if it started to sink all the way in. Long as I got the bucket over there, it's kind of like a a brace; it's not going to let me fall too far. So now I've lost it; whatever support I might have once had is gone. I'm just steadily going in now. I can hold myself up with the arm like indefinitely; it doesn't get tired, but I can't dig and hold myself up at the same time, so that doesn't do me any good. I got to I got to get a track on some solid earth, and I can't seem to get in that direction. So eventually what I did was I just got out; I crossed the ditch, went back toward the road, uh, tracked all the way to the start of the ditch and came back in, centered up better on the trench, and, uh, it was a little dicey on this very end cuz the sides had kind of caved, but, uh, after just maybe 10 feet, I got back to normal precarious and not super precarious, and, uh, we dug the whole rest of the we dug the whole rest of the trench without incident.
So having been off of the machine for a couple of months, you really lose the touch of being able to control the, you know, the boom, the dipper, the swing, and the bucket and both tracks at the same time without having to stop and think about exactly what you're doing. So this is what I have to kept kept having to do—stop and think about my goal here and what I wanted each hand and each foot to do. Um, it wasn't coming naturally. Pretty much lost my footing. I think I might go to the end and start over and try to come back in straight. This turn messed me up cuz when I turned, I broke the corners off. I think maybe if I come in, go to the variant, come back in again, if I can get back on the road side of the ditch, it shouldn't be that big of a problem, although yeah, this is an interesting situation. Okay, we are halfway. Uh, the hard part, getting started is always harder, and it's straight the rest of the way. When I made this turn is when the bank caved in, and I don't have to turn anymore, so we're just, uh, steady digging. I have to get in here my shovel, and not that I'm going to fine-grade it, but kind of halfway halfway fine-grade it, put the fabric in, and I hope my gravel shows up today, or I'm gonna be screwed.
Okay, final stretch of digging. Uh, you've probably seen enough of this already. The only thing I was doing different is I'm turning all the way around when I track backwards so I can watch my tracks. I want to make sure I keep as centered as possible, and I'm trying to be smooth, and when I'm scraping the sides to get the, uh, the trench closer to exactly 3 feet, I'm not pushing very hard cuz the bucket will push the track side, boom, and then the the dirt caves in anyway. Uh, I dig, check grade, move on; a little stick to let let me know how the last good part is, and, uh, back up and dig, check grade, blah, blah, blah. So, uh, yeah, this is it; it's almost dug. Hang with me for [Music] [Music] So this is our trench after I went through through with the shovel and knocked off the bumps, and then my gravel showed up; showed up on an old military truck. I wish I would have videoed it, but I didn't think about it; a cool old truck. We are ready to put in the plastic, the black plastic, gravel. So this fabric has nothing to do with treating the sewage; the fabric is here to keep the fines from the soil from washing into the voids in the gravel and plugging it up. We don't want it to be one big old lump of, uh, solid gravel-dirt mix; we want want to keep the voids in it as long as possible. So this fabric is just a filter for fines, and this fabric is 10 feet wide, so theoretically, 3 feet on the bottom, 1 foot up each side; that's five; it should leave me enough to, uh, cover the top. Well, theoretically went out the window. I don't know whether it bunched up at the sides or I'm just uniformly that much too deep, but I didn't didn't have near enough to, uh, go over the top. I had to cut another piece, which I was going to do anyway, to give the top a double layer, so when I throw the dirt in on top, I wasn't going to tear the fabric. Okay, one more long piece, and we'll be ready to dump gravel, but I don't have it, but I did call a guy, and he did say he's going to bring it.
Okay, I lied; I said this was 10 feet wide; it's 8 feet wide, but it still should have been enough to almost cover the top, um, but it wasn't even close. So, uh, yeah, I don't know whether it got bunched up or the gravel just pulled the sides down; not sure. Anyway, I'm fixing it into place with nails, and the soil is so hard that you just punch them in there; almost don't use a hammer; get it as straight as possible; kick the bottom so there's not too much on the bottom and move ahead. And this is where my little GoPro wore out of, uh, disc space; this is the first time has ever happened to me cuz I got a different disc in there, and it's not a very big one. So, uh, this is the last video; the rest is just me holding the camera, but I think you can get the gist of of what we were doing and what we were trying to do and what we did do. All right, first joint of pipe is in. I had to shovel a lot of rocks; I put too much down here; didn't have enough down there. If you put the writing on the pipe at the top, it puts the holes correctly at the bottom. So I think what I'm going to do now is just park the tractor right here and shovel it out of the bucket to finish this end here. Um, the rest of the straightway—see, I can't get here because of the telephone pole—the rest of it I think will be a little more straightforward. But yeah, we're started; that's the hard part. I was not able to find a fitting at Lowe's or Home Depot to go from the 3-inch schedule 40 to the 4-inch, uh, DWV, which is the perforated pipe. So what I ended up doing is putting a coupling, a glue coupling on the 3-inch schedule 40, and the outside of that glue coupling fit the inside of the 4-inch SDR—it's not SDR—um, DWV, and you know, it fit kind of snug. I could have glued it; I didn't glue any of these joints; I figured, what the heck, they're supposed to leak into the gravel anyway. But that's how I solved that little dilemma. So when I'm pulling up to the trench here, I cannot see the bottom of the trench, so I lay my ladder down, cross the trench; that's kind of my guide, and I dump one full bucket, and then the second bucket I think I'll shovel, cuz when you get too much, that's a pain to move it down the trench. Halfway there; three pipes in, three to go. And I was thinking about adding more pipes, but now I'm not because this gravel is not really a foot deep; it's more like a foot and a half deep; that's a lot of difference. So, uh, yeah, keep on going; it's getting harder to get the gravel in the hole cuz the ditch is deeper, and the tractor will not come straight through there cuz the box on the back drags; I got to come at an angle and turn. Anyway, tried to drop another load and get another piece of pipe in, and I'm going to go get the, uh, memory card out of my game camera so maybe I can get some video; I think it's still got space on it. Get on the trackhoe and dig like another foot and a half to get the last piece in. But when those black clouds roll in and the breeze picks up, it is so nice, but then they go away. 60 feet of pipe is in; I need to bring a little more gravel, catch some low spots. Um, I picked up all my tools because it started thundering, and then we'll lay this black stuff over the top as best we can. Was a little disappointing; I thought it maybe would cover more than that; lay some more black stuff on top, and the easy part, sitting in the trackhoe and cover them back up with dirt. Okay, all the nails are pulled, and the black fabric is flopped over, and a little disappointing, little disappointing; this is 8 feet wide; the trench is 3 feet wide, and the gravel's supposed to be a foot deep, so that's five; I should have 3 feet that I can use across the top, but I don't, and that's because in most places it's deeper, and then also you never get a perfect fold, so there's some waste down there. That's okay; I got a whole bunch more; we'll roll out a strip and fold it over probably three times and put it on the top and start throwing some dirt in here. So this is the best picture I have of the extra layers of black on top before I covered it with dirt, and it started raining, and it didn't quit for quite a while. So that was right after we got the dirt put in place, so kind of happy about that. Yesterday, I laid my 60 feet of, uh, pipe in the ground with the gravel bed, and I was talking about maybe adding a little more because this soil is so dense; I'm not sure how much water it will absorb or or what the time frame would be. Um, I didn't do it yesterday; I got it all sealed up, and it's a good thing cuz it rained most of the night. So now it's a it's not terrible, but it's a sticky mess, so we're going to leave it be today, and I kind of thought I would tie in my sewer coming out from under my bathroom through the system cuz it's good to go, but it's supposed to rain all day, and it's already sprinkling a little bit, so we're going to have to wait for another day. I don't know whether I have enough footage to put out a video on what I've got done so far; we'll have to see when I get home. But anyway, we're ready for the tie-in, and I might or might not add some more linear feet of, uh, perforated pipe, but I got to decide cuz I have this gravel leftover, so it's now or never; either either I'm
Going to add onto my leech field, or I'm going to put this gravel on the road, which I've been doing, but I still have enough. I think the best thing for me to do right now is to do nothing and sit on it for a week. And I come back when the sun's shining and the side's anyway spruced up my drive a little bit with little gravel here and there, and uh, it's kind of sprinkling. I think I'm going to go in the woods and try to map out my uh, my South Trail, which I have halfway mapped out, but not totally. Enough. I'm going to get soaking wet from sweat anyway, so the rain doesn't bother me.