Things Happening and the Pot is Empty (Again!)

It's been a while, but things have been progressing however draininage is not the most glamorous of things - especially fitting a huge tub to hold your waste products! The rain has been relentless and the ground conditions far from ideal.

First we needed to route the water from the (newly-fitted) fall pipes into a soakaway. Mark, from Kirklees Building Control, helped us out immensely here as the site is tight and can only just accept the various drainage options we have to install. However, due to the ground conditions and the rain, every bucketful made two bucketfuls of a hole and then it collapsed. But Russ and Joe did it even though Russ had a broken wrist!

The hole for the packet sewage treatment plant was even bigger. The dimensions of our Diamond DMS2 are:

But the hole was even more enormous:

Then the inevitable happened: loads of rain and the whole hole (😆) collapsed.

Monday of this week was a mad scramble to get the plant in place and surround it with lean mix concrete. 12 tons later and we'd stabilised it. Then came the calculation of the drainage field.

Background: a PSTP works by encouraging bacteria to breakdown the waste from sewage and grey water naturally. The plants do it so effectively that a healthy tank can discharge water that is 95% pure. What it then needs is to have more of nature's wonders break down that other 5%. This could be in a stream or river or, in our case, through the soil. The aerobic breakdown process takes place in the top metre of soil, so we have to be able to drain into this area but make sure that it will not back up and flood the trench.

Rob Lewis from GeoEnviro called this week to do the percolation test and we have great news: 1000l discharged in half an hour; the whole plant discharges at a maximum of 900l per day! The game is on!

We've had our garage doors fitted and the final bi-fold door installation happens next week making us watertight and not a moment too soon because we have now officially run out of money again.

Still... got the T-shirt!