Talking About Sanitation Services

Residential Septic System Do's And Don'ts

Now that you are living in your first home with a septic system, it is important for you to get up to speed on the things that you can do to keep it flowing and healthy. By taking some simple actions, you can preserve your home's septic system and keep it processing your household waste water for many decades to come.

Follow these do's and don'ts to keep your new home's septic system healthy:

Do introduce only water, toilet paper, and human waste products into your home's septic tank. Never flush feminine hygiene products because they do not breakdown and will clog your system's leach lines and leach field.

Don't rely on toilet paper manufacturers to tell you which toilet papers are safe for use in your residential septic system. Some toilet papers marked as "septic-safe" do not breakdown well and will cause you to need a pump out of your system well ahead of its usual schedule.

Do check your toilet paper for septic system appropriateness by placing some squares into a jar full of water and shaking it well. If the toilet paper doesn't very easily break up into very small pieces and paper fibers, then you need to choose a different brand of toilet paper.

Don't ever use a water softener in your home and discharge its brine backwash into your septic tank. The excessive amount of salt will degrade the concrete of your septic tank and will kill the bio-digesting bacteria that your system needs to digest solid human wastes and paper fibers.

Do avoid flooding your septic system by only washing a couple loads of laundry each day. In addition, if you have a large family, then you should space out your showers so that not everyone is showering at the same time of day. Your septic system needs time to process the water flushed into it and without enough time to do so, it will push solids down into your leach lines and permanently damage them.

Don't avoid having your new home's septic system pumped on a regular basis, even if it does not appear to have any problems. If you wait for a drainage issue before attending to the needs of your septic system, then you will find that instead of a simple pumping, your septic system will need thousands of dollars in repairs to replace its leach lines and relocate its leach field. Contact a company like Honest John's Septic Service Inc for more information.


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