It is not all mountain grandeur and pristine lakes and rivers in rural Montana…

Rural life includes a well and a septic system…not connected! – that must be maintained. The septic tank and drain field are down the small hill behind the house.

While there are no monthly charges for water and sewer as in the city, I do pay for the electricity to run the pump and maintenance on both systems. I have wonderful water from a well that has, so far, had no problems. The septic system is old but healthy and working. I am highly motivated to keep it that way. If it ever did fail, the engineered system that would be required as a replacement is in the $20-30K range – yikes! Yep, highly motivated. Ian from Shur-Clean Action Pumping drained and inspected the tank and system for me 3 years ago before I bought the property and today’s visit was scheduled maintenance, i.e. draining.

The outlet baffle needs repair and the guy that does that will be here tomorrow morning. You might be relieved to read that I will not post photos. I might add some notes to this post for future but I think this post is probably more than enough on septic. And for any who see an error in the title/expression, you are correct. It is not the tank over which the grass grows greener, but the drain field…

An unrelated note – the Chimney sweep was here yesterday. I spared the nice man that does the sweeping from a photo session…I did it last year: Chimney Sweep 2008

8/2/2009 Addition

Bill Morton referred by Ian of ShurClean replaced the outlet baffle. Exposing the outlet baffle, turned up a problem with the line to the drainfield. The original line is orangeberg, a paper-like kind of pipe that had deteriorated. About 8 feet of it was removed and replaced with PVC. The joint where the PVC connects to the remaining intact orangeberg is 11 feet from the center of the outlet baffle lid, at about a 30 degree angle from a line from the sewer cap to the outlet baffle.