The septic jobs you can do yourself, and the ones you can't

Quick answer: You can map the system, keep the log, protect the drainfield, watch your water use, and clean an outlet filter if your tank has one. Pumping, opening a tank to look inside, electrical work, and any repair to the drainfield belong to licensed people. Never climb into a tank for any reason.

The tank isn't what fails

A concrete tank buried in the yard can outlast the house. The part that dies is the drainfield, the buried lines or beds where the liquid finally soaks into the ground. Once it's clogged with solids and a slick biological mat, it can't be coaxed back. Replacing one can run into five figures, and that number moves with your soil and your county's rules.

So the whole game is this: keep solids out of the field and keep the field itself undisturbed. Everything below serves that.

Find it before you need it

Start at the county health department. Many keep an as-built drawing from the original permit, with the tank, the lines and the distances from the house and well. Ask for it. It's usually free or close to it.

No drawing? Walk the foundation to where the main drain leaves the house, usually on the side with the bathrooms. Push a steel probe, a length of quarter-inch rebar with a T-handle welded on, into the ground every foot or so along that line. A tank lid announces itself as a hard, flat stop about a foot or two down. Dig it out and you've found your access point.

Then do the part people skip. Mark the tank lid and the corners of the field with steel stakes or paver stones set flush with the grass. Sketch it on a sheet of paper with measurements from fixed points, like the corner of the house and the well head. Staple it to your log.

The log is the real maintenance

Keep one folder with the drawing, every pumping receipt, every inspection note and the date of every repair. Write down tank size and the number of bedrooms the system was permitted for. When you sell, that folder is worth money. When something goes wrong, the pro who shows up reads it before touching anything.

The standard advice from extension services and the EPA is to have the tank inspected and pumped roughly every three to five years. That's a range, not a promise. A big family on a small tank needs it sooner. Two people on a large one can stretch it. Your pumper can measure the sludge and scum layers and tell you which camp you're in.

What you do yourself

Protect the field. Stay off it with vehicles, tractors, and the zero-turn. Compaction kills the soil's ability to absorb. Keep trees and shrubs with aggressive roots away from the lines, and plant plain grass on top. Point gutters, sump pumps and driveway runoff away from it. A field that's already soaked from rain can't take your wastewater too.

Spread out the water. A septic tank needs time to let solids settle. Five loads of laundry on Saturday morning shoves the whole tank's contents toward the field before it's separated. Do one or two loads a day. Fix the running toilet, since a toilet that leaks all night puts hundreds of gallons into the system without anyone noticing.

Flush only what belongs. Toilet paper and human waste. That's the list. Wipes labeled flushable aren't. Grease poured down the sink hardens in the tank. Coffee grounds, cigarette butts, floss and cat litter all end up in the same place. Go easy on the garbage disposal, because it adds solids the tank has to hold.

Skip the additives. Tank treatments are sold with big promises, and regulators and extension offices generally say a healthy system doesn't need them. Some can stir up solids and push them toward the field. Spend that money on pumping.

Go easy on chemicals. An occasional dose of bleach or cleaner won't wreck anything. Dumping a gallon of it to "freshen" the tank will. The bacteria doing the work are alive.

Watch the yard. Walk the field once a month. You're looking for soggy ground with no rain behind it, grass that's suddenly greener or taller in a strip, and any smell. Also pay attention indoors. Gurgling drains, or a toilet that's slow to flush when others are too, usually mean the problem is downstream of your house, not in a single fixture.

The filter job, if you have one

Many newer tanks have an effluent filter at the outlet, a plastic cartridge that catches solids before they leave for the field. If yours is reachable through a riser at ground level, cleaning it is a legitimate owner job. Pull it, spray it off over the tank opening with a hose, and set it back. Wear gloves and eye protection.

Do it with the lid open only briefly, outdoors, with no one leaning in. Tanks hold gases that can overcome a person in seconds. If you can't reach the filter from standing, or the whole idea makes you uneasy, let the pumper do it during the next visit. It costs little extra and nobody gets hurt.

What you don't touch

Anything inside the tank. Never enter one, and never reach down into one. If someone drops a tool or falls in, the answer is to get medical help right away and let trained crews handle the rescue. Gas in a tank is the cause of real deaths among would-be rescuers.

Pumping. It takes a licensed hauler with a truck, and the waste has to go to an approved site. Hand-bailing and dumping it on your back forty is a crime in most places.

Drainfield work. Digging, replacing lines, adding trenches or fixing a failed field needs a permit and often a designer. Your county decides what's allowed. A soil test, sometimes called a percolation test, drives the design. You don't get to eyeball it.

Pumps, alarms and control panels. Mound systems, pressure-dosed fields and any system with a lift pump run on electricity near water and gas. If the alarm light is on, check that the breaker is on, then call a pro. Don't go rewiring a float switch because a video made it look easy.

Baffles and cracked lids. A broken inlet or outlet baffle sends solids straight to the field, and a cracked lid is a hazard to kids and animals. Both need professionals.

The decision with a clear winner

Pumping is cheap next to a field replacement. A routine pump-out is typically a few hundred dollars, and a bad field costs many times that. If you've owned the place for five years and can't find a receipt, schedule it this month.

And if you haven't bought yet, ask for the septic records the same day you ask about the roof. The questions to ask before you buy your first few acres should include an inspection by someone with no stake in the sale. For the long-term numbers, see what a well and a septic really cost to keep running. In cold country, read what freezes first on a property too, because shallow lines and bare snow-free paths over a field are where freezing trouble starts.

The best septic system is the one you forget about, and you earn that by being a little boring about it. Stake the lid. Keep the log. Park the mower somewhere else.