Sometimes when an installation hasn’t been carried out in line with the manufacturer’s guidelines the evidence of such does not immediately come to light and it can sometimes take months for the signs to start appearing. Depending on the scale of the issue this can cause costly rectification works to be required.

Following an attendance on site from one of our service engineers to investigate an issue highlighted by the customer, the ground around the outlet point of the pump station had started to sink and was causing some concerns.

After carefully hand excavating down to find that the pipework in the pump station had been pushed down a 50mm corrugated pipe being used for the soak away, this subsequently had caused the silty water to back fall into the pipework.

In order to have a fully compliant system you must have a functional outfall from your septic tank/ sewage treatment plant. As a sewage treatment plant was install prior to the pump station this could be to either watercourse or to a correctly designed drainage field.

As there was no suitable watercourse near to the property our proposal was to carry out percolation tests within the garden area to ascertain the size of the new drainage field required. We were confident that a new drainage field could be achieved based on our initial trial dig, but percolation tests needed to be carried out in to confirm.

A functioning soakaway is vital for the operation of your sewage treatment plant as a failed soakaway/ outlet will affect the treatment process and can mean that the system is not treating the effluent to the correct standard, it is also a requirement to comply with Building control regulations.

A non-functioning Sewage treatment plant does not comply with the 2020 General Binding Rules so precedence on ensuring that this is functioning as designed is critical. Thankfully our R A Dalton installation team were on hand to rectify the issues being experienced and prolong the life expectancy of the sewage treatment plant and pump station.