How do you find your septic tank?

[csp]

Topography dictates the leaching field with an engineered septic system, and in turn it also dictated the tank location. I like it away from the house.

 

[Frank The Plumber]

L-rods

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Not just for finding your septic tank.

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These guys are funny as hell.
You can find graves with these. You can find buried bodies. The principle here is not magic or voodoo, it is magnetism. As the magnetic pulse comes from the ground and pulls you to the earth it wraps around any buried items at the surface, this creates a ripple in the surface magnetic stream, this ripple draws these diving rods together as you physically pass over this buried item of interference.
One of the keys to this is that you have to believe or at least understand, if you think it is a load of horse poop you just will not relax enough to let the slight change in magnetic field to move the rods, the part that still is odd to me after 40 years of doing this is that as soon as you break the ripple the rods will by themselves part back away from each other.

 

[NUTTSGT]

I actually found mine by a small depression in the yard. I started digging and found the "lid" a piece of 1/8" steel over the top of a small tank. I formed up a new lid, 5 1/2" thick with rebar, had the tank pumped out and slid the new lid on top.

 

[FryZ]

You could be like my neighbor and fall through the top of it while mowing the lawn. Most of our houses in this neighborhood were built in the late '50s to 1960. The town came through and put the sewer system in around '62-'63 and alot of people just left their tanks in the back yard as is...fast forward 50-60 years and some of those tanks are caving in. Lucklily, the POs (and original owners) of my house had the one here crushed and filled in...found the old leach field when we dug for the pool, though.

 

[PCO6]

I actually found mine by a small depression in the yard ...

There are also raised septic beds. They are used when the soil conditions are not suitable for filtering. Sandy soil is brought in and the bed is laid in that. They're not common around here but you do see them. Sometimes you see them in the front yard which is not good if the lot is otherwise flat.

Funny story ... a friend of my wife's moved into a new house with a raised septic bed in the back yard. It's location was as clear as could be. This women's husband planted a tree right in the middle of the bed. I politely asked (THE IDIOT) why he did that. He told me they were going to move in a few years so he didn't care. About 3 years later other friends of ours (total coincidence) bought the house. When I asked how his septic sytem was he grumbled ... the former owner was an IDIOT.

 

[larry4406]

Use Google-Earth and type in your address. Depending on the satellite flyover date, you might be able to visually see the leach lines in your yard due to the different green of the nutrient rich area. With that info, along with your visual observation of the ground topography and knowing where the sewer exists the house, you should be able to make a very educated guess on where the solid tank(s) should be.

 

[justanengineer]

Yeesh...while I agree with most of the methods of finding the tank from this thread, some of the stories here are rather scarey. My personal experience with septic tanks - my father told me many times that 99% of houses dont have correctly installed plumbing and this makes me believe it. The tank in the house I grew up in has been 30 ft from the house, 4 ft underground for 25 years and never had any work done to it. It has also seen its fair share of concrete and semi trucks roll over it during the construction of other buildings on my family's property. To answer the original question - I would simply find a construction company that has one of those ground penetrating radar units as these can also find any other buried utilities simultaneously.