How Do I Know If My Potomac Falls VA Septic Tank Needs Pumped Out?

How do I know if my Potomac Falls VA septic tank needs pumped out? It’s a question we get on a regular basis from the customers we serve and it’s easy to understand why. When your tank fills to the point of overflowing, there’s only one place it can go – inside your house! Nobody wants that. Even if you’ve never had the misfortune of experiencing it, most people intuitively know they don’t ever want to have to deal with that, so it’s an excellent question.

In this piece, we’ll answer it and a couple of related questions besides, so if it’s something you’ve been thinking of asking yourself, this article is for you! Let’s get right to it.

How Do I Know If My Potomac Falls VA Septic Tank Needs Pumped Out?

The first way we’ll answer this question is with a question. How long has it been since you last had your tank pumped out? If you’re not sure and are struggling to remember the date, the safest and best thing you can do is to assume that it’s time.

If you’re looking for a more practical answer you can plug into your calendar or organizer, our recommendation is that you have your system thoroughly inspected and your tank pumped out every three to five years in order to minimize your risk of a serious system problem.

That said, it’s also important to keep in mind that the above is just a general guideline. No two families are alike and in practice, you might need your tank pumped out a bit more often than that. Ultimately that depends on a number of factors including how many people you have in your household, how often you have overnight guests, and how much inappropriate “stuff” winds up getting flushed down the toilets or poured down the sink drains at your house.

Here’s the thing: If you live in a house that’s connected to a city sewage system, anything that’s flushed or poured down the drain stops being your problem the second it clears your pipes. It’s off to the sewage plant where someone else will deal with it.

With a home septic system though, your sewage treatment plant is usually somewhere in your back yard, which means that any and everything that gets flushed or poured into it, sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with it.

Since septic tanks only have so much space inside them, anything that’s non-biodegradable that winds up in your tank is just going to cause it to fill up that much more quickly, which means you’ll have to have the tank pumped out at more frequent intervals if you want to avoid having raw sewage backing up inside your house. And you definitely want to avoid that. At all costs. Seriously.

That brings us to an interesting point. If the rule of thumb is only a general guideline, is there anything else you can use to help answer the question: ‘How do I know if my Potomac Falls VA septic tank needs pumped out?’

The short answer is a resounding yes!

Although your septic system doesn’t have any high tech diagnostics built into it, it will try to tell you in its own way if it’s beginning to struggle. It comes down to knowing what to look for and making sure those things are on your radar. Here are some of the more common signs that your system is having problems:

  1. You start noticing foul smells in the area of your drain field outside, or wafting up from your toilets and sink drains.
  2. There are areas of persistently wet, soggy, muddy ground in and around your drain field, and no amount of hot, dry weather seems to make it go away.
  3. The grasses growing over your drain field are of a distinctly different, and usually brighter shade of green than the grasses growing everywhere else in your yard.
  4. The pipes inside your walls shake rattle and groan, making your house sound as though it’s haunted, every time you flush a toilet or turn on a faucet.
  5. Your sinks drain with an almost painful slowness and nothing seems to help.
  6. Your toilets won’t flush properly, and no amount of plunging seems to help.

All of these are signs that your home septic system is in distress. While they don’t necessarily mean that the tank is filling up, that’s one of the things these signs could mean. In any case, if you see any of these, that’s your cue to pick up the phone and give us a call right away!

Septic problems don’t go away on their own. They only get worse over time, and ultimately, they all end up the same way. That nightmare scenario of raw sewage inside your home.

Don’t take that chance. Don’t let things get to that point. There’s a simple solution. Give us a call at the first sign of trouble and let us put your septic system on a preventive maintenance program that will see it receive pump outs and inspections on a regular basis.

It’s just not worth the risk to do anything less, and honestly, it provides you as a home owner with tremendous peace of mind. It’s just one less thing you have to worry about. Call us today. You’ll be very glad you did.

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