My weekend began with a little light reading, enjoying one of our first nice spring Saturdays digesting some of Neil Peart's "Travelling Music" with my coffee on the back deck. Every so often I got a whiff of sewage or some similar odour, but didn't think much of it.....until I also heard a bubbling sound.
We have had our septic tank pumped out before, but in almost nineteen years here, we had never even looked at the greywater system. I popped the inspection cap off the greywater pop, and everything looked good - clean - but no water was making it that far up the pipe.
Turns out under the paving stone we had never moved, there is a tank (well, cement box)....and it was full! So full in fact, that excess water was just overflowing into the lawn beside it and pooling.
I grabbed some gloves, a bucket and an old empty plastic coffee can. I took out ten buckets of water, which got me down to the sludge.....which had suddenly blocked the flow of water out of the holding tank. I took out ten coffee cans full of sludge, which let me pull out the elbow pipe and clean it, which also let me get a little more sludge out of the bottom before returning the pipe.
All good now - apparently we just need to clean it out a little more often than every nineteen years or so. Not exactly how I had planned to spend my Saturday morning, but obviously time well spent.
We also got a few days of heavy rain shortly thereafter, so likely good to have the plumbing in order as the yard was flooded enough just from Mother Nature. Can't complain too much since others were still getting snow, while we had green grass, daffodils and budding trees. And a fairy ring on the front lawn!
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