Sewage Treatment Plant Maintenance

[Crunchynut]

I wondered what different people do regarding the maintenance of their sewage treatment plants. Do they use a contractor, do it themselves, don’t do anything?

 

The regs seems to call for ‘maintenance by a competent person’ and for records to be kept for 7 years. I couldn’t find a definition for ‘competent person’. Certainly, if you look at what some maintenance providers say they will do, then there’s little there that I can’t do myself. And I can do those checks every month, not every 12 months.

 

So - what do you do? What do you think of your maintenance provider (no need to name names). Any hints and tips?

[ProDave]

The only real "maintenance" is de sludging every 2 or 3 years typically.  You can't do that yourself.  Not unless you have a tanker, a waste carriers licence and somewhere to take it for processing.

 

Otherwise it's check the blower pump is still pumping and replace or repair if not.  That is definitely DIY.

[nod]

Ours has been running for five years now 

We haven’t touched it since I installed it 

[Redoctober]

Likewise, we don't touch ours other than to service the pump. This is a very basic DIY job.

If you are looking at a treatment plant that requires such a high level of maintainance then I would suggest you look at other models. There are plenty of such models used by members on this forum which have so few moving parts, maintainance is kept to a minimum.

[Crunchynut]

Ah - perhaps I skipped an important detail which is where the general binding rules can not be complied with then annual maintenance is mandated along with record keeping.  In my case, because discharge is to a ditch that is sometimes dry then a permit is needed.

 

I agree - maintenance should be minimal, but I just wondered what people did, hence the question. Thanks for the replies so far.

[Crunchynut]

12 hours ago, Redoctober said:

Likewise, we don't touch ours other than to service the pump. This is a very basic DIY job.

If you are looking at a treatment plant that requires such a high level of maintainance then I would suggest you look at other models. There are plenty of such models used by members on this forum which have so few moving parts, maintainance is kept to a minimum.

True,  but then pipes get blocked, things get put down the loo that shouldn’t have been etc etc. So whilst the basic mechanics are robust, these things do need a regular check ….. don’t they?

[Kelvin]

They do indeed. We had a shared holding tank and pumping station at the previous house that pumped the sewerage to the main sewer pipe at the bottom of the drive which was a few hundred metres to the road. If had two pumps in a float chamber. It was oversized for the 8 properties and consequently would get a bit stuck occasionally largely because the wrong things were getting flushed down the loos. You could manually activate the pumps rather than wait for it to automatically pump when it was full enough. Sometimes though you needed a big stick. 🤮