We always take your cesspool waste to a registered waterworks. There are several that we use, the most regular of which are at Ashford, New Romney, Wingham and Faversham. These are all owned by Southern Water and are strictly regulated.
All sewage tankers have to be registered with Southern Water and the Environment Agency and carry a Waste Carriers Licence.
There is no hard and fast rule on this I am afraid as it depends on the tank you have and the overflow system you have in place.
If you are buying a house with a cesspool ask the previous owners how often they had it done and ask that as part of the deal they have it done the week before you move in.
Some properties just need the tank emptying once a year, others every six months or every 3 months.
A Cesspool is simply a single-chamber storage tank with no outlet. The tank is usually very large (as it has to contain all waste water and sewage) and often made from concrete or brick. The only way to dispose of the waste is by hiring a licensed sewage contractor to remove the sewage for off-site disposal.
A Septic Tank is either two chambers, the first chamber all waste goes into and is allowed to decompose through bacterial activity. The water trickles through the dip pipe near the top of tank. This can either go into a second water chamber and then into a soakaway or straight into a soakaway (usually a pit filled with rubble and capped off so the dirt can't get in).
Most tanks let the solids go to the bottom; the water continues to fill the tank and then gently overflows through a pipe (dip-pipe) into a soakaway tank. This is usually filled with rubble and filters the water and let it soak away into the ground.
If you don’t get your tank emptied solids can start overflowing into the soakaway and this will get clogged up and stop working.
Some tanks you can also put a reed bed system in which cleans the water which can be then allowed to go into a ditch – but this is a specialised area and the water has to be clean before it is allows to do this.
A Treatment Plant is a packaged miniature sewage-works that converts raw sewage into water effluent and solid waste (sludge).
These treatment plants come in all shapes and sizes but all use the same simple science tackling sewage. By putting bacteria into contact with oxygen and food (organic waste) this results in a natural biological breakdown or a more technical term is aerobic digestion.
There are various types of treatment plants but the BioDisc range for example, acts by rotating the host ‘media’ through the effluent. Biotec models move the effluent over the host media. Media is simply bacteria growing on perforated plates designed to provide a large contact area for this digestion to take place.
No Treatment Plant is a ‘fit & forget’ product as they do require periodic maintenance and a degree of care to keep working to optimum levels.
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