One of those "days"...If you know what I mean...Yesterday, I realized something bizarre, horrible and strange was occurring out in the front flower garden. Water was bubbling up from the ground. Foul, evil smelling water...then the top of the regarde pipe sort of blew out and wads of toilet paper and foul smelling muck oozed out...I realized I had a problem...I spent some time digging around the pipe and trying to remember how I had marked the plaques that covered the top of the septic tank years ago...
You know, I am not an expert in these matters...all knowledge I have acquired about plumbing and waste disposal matters has been painfully earned. I grew up in apartments and when their was a problem...well you called the landlord...now I live in the profound country side...this is my problem and if I can't solve it myself, well, I have to find an "expert"....
So, I woke up at 4 am this morning trying to figure out where the fatal clog was...At 10 am, my very good friend, Marius came over to help. We did what we knew how to do best...dig, dig and keep digging. We excavated the top of the septic tank or Fosse septique as we call it here in La Sechere and opened the the gates of hell...Luckily, we were able to deduce that the tank was not full, but there was nothing entering it or leaving it. We opened the sand bed on the lawn, and found it quite healthy looking. So the problem began to become apparent. We used a snake to try to unclog the pipe line into the tank...the snake went in, but nothing happened...I realized my wife had covered the ventilation pipe because she objected to the occasional smell it released...she had sealed it almost airtight with bungi cords and plastic bags..
We got a pressure hose and started to blast the pipe and I kept running into the house to make sure that the pressure wasn't backing up and coming out of the toilet....after an hour...something started to bubble and voila! water started to flow into the tank...it was unclogged! We did it! My night mare ended... everything is flowing smoothly...I thought I was going to have to get a big truck out here to pump out the tank and pay them a few hundred Euros to clean the system...
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| Microdot and Marius are so very happy! |
I'm so relieved that all I want to do is just dance! No heavy thinking today...I am so happy!
4 comments:
Dude! What is that brick building in the back ground? Is that a barn?
Holy Shit, a European tour may be eminent.
That is my 150+ year old stone barn...around 1960, the people who had the big farm enlarged the barn and topped it off with red construction bricks. Now you can drive a tractor up a ramp into the upper part which is being used as a hay loft. It is full of rolls and bales of hay from last season for my friends horses. It's huge...I just had the back wall rebuilt and the roof is new after the big storm 4 years ago. The horses mainly belong to the wife of the dude working with me....she has at any given time 18 to 26 horses...some are her permanent herd and the others are rescue horse which she rehabilitates...that is her hobby and my buddy, Marius' nightmare. I don't have the farm, it got sold when the property went ip for sale, but I have about 1/2 hectare and it is totally rural here. We are the last building on a road that just kind of peters out into the woods on a ridge with valley on two sides...If you are interested in a google tour of the area, I think this might work...I am at the place called La Sechere.
https://maps.google.com/?ll=45.230639,1.204678&spn=0.093813,0.263844&t=w&z=13
I tested the link, it takes you to my area, if you look in the center, there is a place called Badefols d'Ans...if you enlarge it and go south, you find La Sechere...only 5 houses here and maybe that many people.
Had a similar problem a few years ago. It turned out to be we were using non-septic safe toilet paper and it wasn't dissolving and ended up plugging the input pipe to the septic tank.
the Ol'Buzzard
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