How Do I Know If My Loudoun County Va Septic Tank Needs Pumped Out?
How do I know if my Loudoun County VA septic tank needs pumped out? It’s a question we get on a fairly regular basis from the customers we serve and it’s not hard to understand why. Even people who have never experienced the nightmare of raw sewage backing up into their home first hand intuitively understand they never want to, and if a bit of proactivity can help reduce the chance of that happening, most home owners are all for it!
If you’ve been wondering much the same thing, you’re in luck. In this article, we’ll answer that question in a variety of different ways and give you some valuable tools you can use to help ensure that your septic system provides you with years of reliable service. If that sounds good to you, let’s take a closer look at the issue.
How Do I Know If My Loudoun County VA Septic Tank Needs Pumped Out?
We’ll provide the simplest answer first. Our recommendation is that you have your tank pumped out and your system inspected from end to end every three to five years. The problem with that guideline is that if you don’t know when the last time the tank was pumped out, and you don’t have any records to indicate a firm date, you may already be past that line.
In that case, your safest course of action is to schedule service right away, log the date and then set up a digital reminder so it’s never an issue again.
The important thing to understand about the timeframe above though, is that it’s just a general guideline. It’s fine as a rule of thumb, but it’s not very precise because every household is different. The exact frequency you’ll need your tank pumped out depends on a lot of factors, including how many people you have in your house, how often you have overnight guests and how good your septic system habits are.
Septic system habits? If you’re used to living in a home that’s tied to a city sewage system and have only recently moved into a home with a septic tank, that may surprise you, but it’s true! There are good and bad septic habits.
Mostly, this comes down to mindfulness. If you live in a home tied to a sewage system, then you don’t have to worry a lot, or really even think much about what gets flushed down your toilets or poured down your sink drains. Whatever winds up there is off to the sewage treatment plant where someone else will take care of it. You may clog the drain once in a while, but after you clear the clog, it’s just not a big deal.
It doesn’t work that way if you have a septic system. Everything winds up in the tank, and the more stuff you flush down the toilet or pour down the sink drain that doesn’t belong there, the more often you’ll wind up having it pumped back out, which costs you money.
All of that is well and good, but there’s one more very important aspect of answering the question ‘How do I know if my Loudoun County VA septic tank needs pumped out?’ that we haven’t touched on yet.
When your septic system starts experiencing trouble, it will try to tell you, but if you don’t know the signs to look for, you’ll miss them completely. Unfortunately, your septic tank can’t send out a text message to alert you when there’s trouble, but it does have a number of ways that it will try to let you know. Here are some of the more common ones:
1) You notice areas of persistently wet, muddy ground in and around your drain field, even after several hot, dry days. It just never seems to go away.
2) The pipes inside your house rattle loudly and may even make groaning sounds every time you flush a toilet or turn one of your faucets on.
3) Your sinks start inexplicably draining slowly and your toilets won’t flush properly and none of your usual fixes for those kinds of problems seem to do any good.
4) The grass and other plants growing over your septic tank and drain field are a brighter shade of green than they are anywhere else in your yard.
None of these things automatically mean that your septic tank is reaching its limit, but that’s certainly one possibility. All of them though, indicate a septic system that’s struggling to do its job effectively, and unfortunately, by the time you start seeing those symptoms, the underlying problem that’s causing them has already grown to a fairly advanced stage. If action isn’t taken immediately, you could be in for some serious trouble.
That’s why having your tank pumped out and your system inspected at regular intervals is so important. As the area’s top-rated septic service company, nobody knows more about keeping your system in good working order than we do, and we’d love the opportunity to impress you with our superior service.
We’ve been in the business for a long time, and there’s not much our experienced crews haven’t seen at this point. At the first sign of trouble, give our office a call and we’ll send a team out to get to the bottom of the issue. You can count on us.