How Do I Know If My Leesburg Va Septic Tank Needs Pumped Out?
One of the questions we get fairly regularly from the clients we serve is ‘How do I know if my Leesburg VA septic tank needs pumped out?’ We love getting those types of questions because it shows that our customer is interested in being proactive and doing everything they can to get out in front of potential problems with their systems.
If you’ve been wondering the same thing, you’re in luck and this article was written with you in mind. Below, we’ll answer that question in a couple of different ways and give you some valuable tools you can start making use of today that will help ensure your home septic system provides you with years of mostly headache and hassle-free service.
How Do I Know If My Leesburg VA Septic Tank Needs To Be Pumped Out?
Our recommendation, and the simplest and most direct answer to the question is this: Have your tank pumped out and your system inspected from end to end, every three to five years. Of course, that’s only valuable if you know when the last time the tank was pumped out. If you’ve recently purchased your home, you may simply not have that information, or if you forgot to log it somewhere last time you had it done, it can reduce you to guesswork.
The bottom line is, if you’re not sure, the safest course of action is to assume that it’s time, have it done, and then keep track from there, leaving yourself a digital reminder so you stay on a consistent schedule from that point forward.
A lot of homeowners get complacent though, and figure that if there’s no problem, they can afford to skip their regularly scheduled tank pump outs and inspections. That’s almost always a bad idea, because if you wait until there’s a problem, you’re operating purely by reacting. If you’re proactive and have regular pump outs and inspections, it gives us the opportunity to spot problems while they’re still in their formative stages and relatively easy to repair, which saves you money.
It’s also important to remember that the above serves as a general guideline. It’s a rule of thumb, and useful, but every household is different and the exact frequency you’ll need your tank pumped out is dependent on a number of factors, the biggest being:
- How many people you have living in your home
- How often you have overnight guests, and
- How good your septic tank habits are
If you’ve lived most of your life in a home that was tied to a municipal city grid, it might surprise you to learn that there are actual septic system habits, but it’s true. While there are a number of important differences between that and living in a house with a septic system, the one we want to focus on for the purpose of this article is:
When you live in a home that’s tied to the city’s system, it doesn’t really matter what gets flushed down your toilet or poured down your sink drain. Of course, sometimes it might clog up a drain, but once you deal with that, whatever caused the clog in the first place is off to the sewage treatment plant where somebody else will deal with it.
Septic systems aren’t like that. Literally everything that gets poured down the drain or flushed down the toilet winds up in your tank where you’ll have to deal with it at some point. The more inappropriate stuff that finds its way into your tank, the more often you’ll have to pump it back out, and that costs you money. Good septic habits then, mostly come down to an increased mindfulness of everything that’s going into your system.
All of that is good, useful information as far as it goes, but there’s another important aspect of answering the question ‘How do I know if my Leesburg VA septic tank needs pumped out?’ that we haven’t touched on yet.
When your system starts to struggle, it can’t send you an alert on your phone or tweet at you to let you know it’s having problems; it’s just not that high tech. Even so, it does try to tell you when it’s having problems, but that only works if you know the signs to look for. Here are some of the most common signs of trouble:
- The pipes inside your walls shake and groan when you turn on faucets or flush your toilets, making your house sound like it’s haunted.
- Foul smells start wafting up from your sink drains and toilets, and linger around your drain field.
- You start noticing areas of persistently soggy, muddy ground in the area of your drain field.
- The grasses growing over your drain field are a very different shade of green than the grasses growing elsewhere in your yard.
The problem is, by the time you start seeing any of these, whatever problem is causing the symptoms has already gotten fairly advanced. If action isn’t taken immediately, you could be in for real trouble. Worst of all, septic problems never get better on their own, and in the end, they all wind up at pretty much the same place; with raw sewage backing up into your house.
The good news is that it never has to come to that. At the first sign of trouble, give our office a call, and we’ll take care of you.