Septic Lesson#7 Fittings for Leaching Pipe Access

In this video I want to show you how you can modify the ends of your leaching

pipes when you're finished jetting them so that you can have easy access to do

the jetting operation again in the future either if you have a plug up or

just as a preventative maintenance thing. Now if you come and take a look here

you'll see that that there's a brick here set flush to the ground. Directly

below that brick is the end of the leaching pipe in my system but it's not

the end of the leaching pipe as it was originally constructed. The original

end was probably about to eight feet back from there and so when I had that

open pipe I realized that I had more room to increase the length of the

leaching pipes which would increase the capacity to to get rid of sewage. So what

I did and this might vary in your case you may not be able to do this or the

details might vary but I got a transition fitting so that's a fitting

that is that accepts a PVC pipe on one end and an ABS pipe on another. I could

have continued my extension with more PVC pipe but I like ABS better

because it's stronger. Let me just show you how you can tell the difference. This

is a chunk of PVC it's thinner walled and this is the stuff that's often used

for leaching pipe. If you look closely you can see PVC down here the the ABS

is is stronger and and much thicker walled and I wanted the greater strength

so I transitioned from PVC to ABS and this is what's called a clean out. So

directly underneath this brick here if I were to dig down about a foot or so I

would come to something like this. So instead of having to dig up a whole

bunch of space and root around and find the ends of the pipes if I want to jet again I just dig down about a foot unscrew this end and then I can clean

out the inside of the pipes from there. Now the idea with extending the pipe was

to create more more leaching area and that meant drilling holes in this ABS

pipe three-quarter inch holes about every six to eight inches or so with the

holes oriented facing downwards so that the the fluid can leak out. As I said you

could get pre-perforated pipes already in PVC and extend them but I just

decided to go with the ABS. One other thing when you're setting these pipes if

you're doing an extension like I did you certainly want some slope. These pipes

need to be sloped downwards in relation to the tank but you don't want to slope

them too much because if it's if it's sloped too much then the fluid will run

past the weeping holes too quickly and won't have a chance to seep in. So the

rule of thumb for this sort of thing is a slope of about half a bubble. See the

bubble there? So this would be level and this would be half a bubble. So half a

bubble if you're doing an extension is the degree of slope that you want and of

course you want to mark that some way too so that maintenance of the pipes in

the leaching bed can be done very easily. There's one last thing I want to leave

you with in this video. You can very easily assess how well your leaching

pipes are functioning by looking at the leaching bed after the grass hasn't been

cut for a while and you can see here we have four leaching pipes in this system

and the richer lusher grass as you'd expect is growing along the entire

length of all these four pipes. Now before I did this revival operation on

this system one pipe was completely dead. It never grew any differently than any

of the places around it and the others were just very slightly more lush and

that was when the whole system was completely backed up but as as soon as

the jetting and the soil amendment was done we have full full percolation out

of all of the pipes and not just at the end where I added those extensions but

all along the whole length and it's been working like that now for more than

three years