Be Careful What You Flush Down Your Toilet
If you live in an area without a municipal sewer system you probably drain your sinks, showers, washing machines and toilets into a septic tank. If you’ve lived in a home with a septic tank for any length of time you’re aware that proper maintenance of your septic system is important if you want to avoid some serious problems. If you have already had problems with your drainage system and you are in the greater Atlanta region you’ll want to call a good Atlanta plumber.
Many people who have a septic tank have no idea how it works. They think it is a magical place where you can dump just any old thing and expect it to be “taken care of”. But the truth is, septic systems don’t use magic to get rid of solid and semi-solid waste material. They use bacteria to break down waste matter – mostly human feces and certain kinds of bio-degradable paper – and they do an admirable job of it most of the time. But there are some things that the bacterial action in a septic tank will simply not break down.
For the first 18 years of so of my life I lived in a small town where most of the houses in town were built within a few hundred yards of a creek. From one end of town to the other sewer pipes and a good number of open sewer ditches connected the homes to the creek. Some of these ditches carried the runoff from septic tanks. But in other cases the ditches were connected right up to the drain pipes from homes with no septic tank between the toilet and the ditch.
The result was pretty disgusting – raw sewage running in open ditches – although the ditches themselves tended to act as cleansing agents. The solid matter in the sewage from the houses would eventually settle on the bottom of the ditch and eventually break down into a black foul-smelling ooze. The liquid would either evaporate or run along the ditch and eventually flow into the creek.
When I was a young boy of about 10 or 12 my friends and I spent a good deal of our time exploring the creek. Like good CSI agents we could tell quite a bit about the people in various houses by a not-too-detailed examination of the stuff floating in those open ditches.
As you can imagine, some of those floating things were not easily broken down. Some were made of heavy-duty absorbent paper materials. Others were made of rubber or vinyl. Some of them may still be floating in the river where the creek eventually drained.
These adventures along the creek taught me two important things about life in a small town, and both of them can be summed up in the aphorism: “Be careful what you flush down your toilet.”
So the next time you’re tempted to flush some greasy gooey stuff, or something made of cardboard or rubber or plastic or vinyl down your toilet, think of those open ditches with all that tell-tale stuff floating in them. That’s exactly the way those things will look in your septic tank. Except they’re not going to float away into the river or settle to the bottom of the ditch. They’ll stay there until your tank stops working. And in some cases they’ll get into your weeping bed and plug that up too.
If you have been a bit careless about what you’ve been flushing down your toilet you may want to contact a septic tank specialist to have a look before you have real problems. If you’re in the Atlanta area you should look for Atlanta drain cleaning on the web. For a small fee they will pump your tank and give the system a thorough flushing out, and both you and your septic tank will be given a fresh start.
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