A clogged sewer line leads to an entire septic system replacement

[Music] this is shawn with gate city foundation drainage we're on a job today and the pipes are backing up and so you just saw me undo trying to get to the septic tank here and so when the pipes are backing up and you've got a septic tank one of two things really is what's going on either the pipe between the house and the septic tank is clogged up which is what you're hoping for or the leach field is clogged up which is what you don't want so i think this is the lid right here so i'm going to get in there with my shovel and try to pry that open and what we're hoping for is we're hoping for that thing not to be overflowing with water if it's not overflowing with water we'll run the snake through there and see if that'll clear it if it is overflowing with water that means that the leech field has failed and that the water is backing up into the septic tank and back up into the house okay i just got this septic tank opened up and you can see here the pipe is clear right there so if this thing was full of water if the water was up over the pipe there would be a problem with the leech field and so this is nothing more than a problem with roots or something getting in that pipe between right there and under the house so that's good news for us we're going to snake it out and that should solve this problem since we've got the tank open i'm going to call my septic pump guy and get him over here to pump this tank out just because why not it's right here it's open easy to get to but i wanted to show you look at how close to the tree we are right there so this is not the best situation and i'm pretty sure this post right here is sitting on the tank so i'm not sure what's going on with this deck but this deck may may not last right here for very long but anyway so so far so good let's get the cleanout machine hooked up finally got her to break loose it's got so much torque you know what i mean or not yeah so what do you think it was i don't know what full backseat all right i'm gonna say what's going on yeah that was what come out of it did that come out yeah that's okay i bet you've got brick that's red brick ain't it yeah red terracotta ah i bet you got a piece of terracotta in there that's what it is you think i got a piece of terracotta in there in between in between the pvc get lost here in a sec yeah apparently you just saw me pull out that piece of old terracotta and so that indicated that there was a piece of terracotta in between the house and the septic tank and so here i'm taking a look at this deck and the deck is just in really poor condition and there's really not a good way to dig up that pipe going from the house to the tank and so you can see we talked about that that post right there is sitting on the tank and there's where i have to dig so basically we decided the deck was in such poor condition to begin with and it had so many issues and trying to get there's not even any beams under there if you notice that there's no beams or girders going across there so we decided just to go ahead and remove the deck and that would give us room to get to the pipe and so i'm just going to cut across the deck and cut it into chunks and get it with that mini excavator [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] all right i wanted to give you a quick update i got the deck out of here and it looks so what we thought happened or what we thought was going on is going on so check out this terracotta pipe right here that i just bumped into so under the house it's cast iron poking into the septic tank it's pvc and so that's terra cotta right there so that's why the pipe or the that's why the thing backed up because the terracotta is getting crushed probably because of roots so i'm going to try to expose a little bit more of this but i don't really want to dig too much out until i'm ready to replace the pipe so boy what a mess what was happening with my snake is it kept bringing back a bit full of mud so take a look at what i just found it looks like this terra cotta has separated and so my snake was probably making its way underneath the proximal pipe right there and when corey brought his big machine over it probably had no place to go but into the correct pipe so well we're gonna get it fixed we took a closer look at that septic tank and it was a cinder block created tank and it was from the 50s and so we already were back there working we had the deck out of there and so we decided to just go ahead and replace the septic tank and replace the leech field and so here i am backing up i met the truck driver we had to order a poly a single piece septic tank and this is really the way to go with a septic tank a single piece and uh in north carolina you have to have a double chamber one so we got the correct one in there and they the only one they had in stock anywhere in the country was kind of an expensive one that was pre-plumbed so we ended up spending a couple hundred bucks for a couple of sanitary teas that make up the baffle but here we are getting i met the truck driver with my little dump truck to get it delivered before we can get this septic tank dug out of here we need to get it pumped out so this is my local septic pump guy and you can see what he's got right there is he's got like a propeller and so what he does is he makes sure to liquefy everything in the bottom of the tank so that his suction truck can actually get everything cleaned out of there so there he is starting it up and he's just going to liquefy everything in there and this guy does a really great job at pumping tanks out i've used him a few times before i've got this pipe exposed and you can see we go from cast iron into terracotta and then it went into pvc once it hit the tank so you can see how bad a shape this tank is and it's all caved in on itself so this tank has been leaking and cracked probably for years and needed to be replaced it was built out of cinder blocks so it was a block tank there's the lid from when they set the set the deck on the tank and it caved in right over there so this is a job we're going ahead and getting it done on the homeowner's time before it everything failed on it so what turned into a backed up toilet turned into a much bigger job but there were underlying issues that needed to be corrected anyway so it's working out okay this is my big excavator my kx91 and you've seen several videos where i did some repairs to it and i've done a couple jobs with it but this septic tank job was the reason i bought this bigger excavator and so this was actually the first job that i ever did with this excavator this big one and so i've been eager to get this video out yeah you can really see the condition of the tank now with those two or those three lids off so this was a cinder block tank and you can see they used thin blocks there and what they did is they they set three of those precast lids on top of it and that was their tank and one of the problems this tank had is somebody built a deck and put a post right on top of the tank so that put a lot of pressure in a very centralized place and so that lid collapsed in there that's where that is in there i think i think that's what that is maybe that's part of the wall but we're going to use part of this hole for the new tank and so i'm going to try to get these cinderblocks out of here and our local landfill will take clean cinder blocks in concrete but i just realized that those precast had rebar in them so they won't take those so there's the leach field right there so we're going to be positioning our tank in some direction we're not really sure where but i want to get this cleaned up at least the plumbers will be here tomorrow and we'll be able to take a look and see where the final tank is going to go so i'm going to work on that for a [Music] minute [Music] so once i got that old septic tank dug out of there it was just a matter of making the hole larger for the new larger capacity tank and so here i am just with the new excavator digging this hole bigger and look how close we are to that oak tree so it's still yet to be seen if that oak tree is going to survive or not it it seemed to do okay for the rest of summer but we'll see what it looks like come springtime the manufacturer of this tank recommends that you lay the tank on a bed of sand and so they give you a few specifications that you may be able to use native soil but the premium installation is to bring in some sand and that way the thing is is pretty much self-leveling all the time and so of course that's what we did we brought in some sand the sand was not specifically required for our soils but it does give you a little bit better installation so cory's down in the hole leveling out the sand i'm delivering it with the mini bobcat and josh if you look in that corner there josh is under the the house stubbing out he's connecting the new pvc to the pvc under the house and getting rid of that little piece that last piece of cast iron that was under there in this clip you can see josh down there in the hole and he's trying to level things out so we had set the tank a couple of times and checked it for level and we had to tweak it here and there and i really am glad i did the sand in the bottom of it because that made leveling it much much easier than trying to use just regular dirt to level it so it's just a matter of fitting it in there and checking for level pulling it out and tweaking our grade and then dropping it back in so [Music] [Music] i'm trying to fold it looks good this way now looks like you're up a little high on that side over here there you go [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] part of this tank installation requires filling this center area with soil or sand in this case and packing it down and so that gives a little bit of internal stability and i guess support structural support to the tank so this was a pretty important step here and so you can see here i'm just filling up with with na uh the sand that we brought in and then i'm gonna be tamping it down here in a second as well and so again that sand wasn't required for installation but i think it made things go a lot smoother and i'm really glad we brought it in if i ever do another one of these poly tanks i'll definitely bring sand in again made leveling it a lot more easy and i think we got a better job out of it as well both looking at me don't dump that and grab some that dry stuff and come over here and sprinkle it right here so we can pack it here josh is just finishing up with the inlet and so you can see our pipe coming out of the foundation right there and into the septic tank so the other thing that represents is now the entire house has got pvc and we completely got rid of all the cast iron under there here i'm back filling around the tank and the guys are watching me and spotting to make sure i don't get any big rocks because you don't want any big rocks right up against the tank it's okay if they're away from the tank but you don't want the big rocks right up against the tank and so i'm trying to sort through and find the finest of materials and then dropping it along each side of the tank and the guys are spotting me here we're working on the outfall from the septic tank to the leach field and i didn't film it but i dug two two legs for the leech field we're using chambers instead of a traditional gravel leech field and we spent a ton of time you want this this header right here to be perfectly level so that it delivers water equally to both sides of the leech field and so we spent a bunch of time working on this here it's a double uh a double t a double sanitary tee right there in the center and we also spent a bunch of time betting this pipe really really well so that it wouldn't move around on us once we got it in place here josh is working on the first part of the first leg of chambers and he gets that that that first segment in there and gets it nice and level and then he just starts laying in i think those are four foot pieces of chambers and you just lay them one after another so i had never messed with these chambers before but this is a really really nice technology it does not require any gravel and they they pretty much one foot of chamber pretty much works as two feet of traditional leech field and so i think i i think i put in about 200 feet of these chambers they're very expensive but they really work well and labor is a lot easier for installation so i didn't film any more of this we just pretty much finished the leech field and covered it back up but it's been about it's been about six months or so and the septic tank is working really well everything's working great so this was a really nice install and a nice little project

Channel: Gate City Foundation Drainage

Views: 66,105

Keywords: greensboro septic repair, greensboro septic leach field, septic leach field repair, replacing septic leach field, greensboro clogged leach field, greensboro clogged septic, failed septic leach field, clogged septic leach field, chamber leach field, infiltrator chambers, north carolina septic repair, diy septic leach field repair, toilets backing up, septic system backing up, septic backing up, septic overflowing, greensboro septic contractor, greensboro septic installer

Id: mz1HJnGtKPw

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2021