Septic Tank Efficiencies

Septic tank pumping in Iowa City, Iowa helps to ensure that your waste treatment system is as efficient as possible and ensures that you don’t run into any complications. However, these systems could often use a little help to run more efficiently with minimal issues. Thankfully, homeowners can utilize a variety of techniques to improve the efficiency of their units and to make them easier to use and minimize how often you need to get your tank pumped throughout the lifetime of your drain field, your plumbing system, and your home in general.

So if you’re looking to improve your septic tank efficiency and minimize how often you need to pump, then you need to take the following considerations into mind. These concepts are critical to understand because they can help you better grasp how to get your septic system running as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Just as importantly, these methods can help to save you water waste by ensuring that you utilize your water in a way that minimizes excessive loss and saves you money at the same time.

Minimizing Toilet Water Use

The toilet is one of the most significant contributors to your water use and produces a large amount of your wastewater in a day. Typically, you can expect your toilets to account for 25-30 percent of all the water used during a day. This number makes sense if you think about it. After all, even if you wash all of your cars with a hose once a week, you’re still not using as much water as you would use when flushing a toilet. This level of excess water use makes toilets one of the most wasteful appliances in a home, though this problem can be avoided.

For example, if you install a high-efficiency toilet, you can cut your water loss with each flush by as much as half. Standard non-efficiency toilets typically utilize as much as 3.5 to 5 gallons per flush, which is more water than is usually necessary. When you install an efficiency toilet, you are using anywhere from 1.6 to 2 gallons less per flush. That’s not insignificant – if your home has four people and everyone flushes the toilet five times a day, that is up to 40 gallons saved, cumulatively, every day.

Extending these savings out a little, that’s 280 gallons per week, 1,200 per month, and 14,600 gallons every year. All of that water savings are great for your septic tank pumping because it means that all that excess wastewater doesn’t end up in your tank. As a result, you can not only improve the efficiency of your plumbing and septic systems but even add years of life to it at the same time. Most home hardware stores have these toilets available, so seek one out if you want to protect your home and your septic system from excessive water use.

Adding Better Aerator Designs

The aerators on your sinks and showers are essential for controlling the water flow throughout your plumbing system. However, most people don’t fully understand how wasteful that these items can be if you don’t utilize efficiency units. For example, a faucet without an efficiency aerator will use at least two times as much water per second as one with an efficiency unit. Like with the toilets, this type of waste can affect your septic tank pumping and cause problems that you could have easily avoided.

However, this issue is more potent for showers because they use more water than a typical sink. For example, a conventional showerhead that uses five gallons of water each time someone in your four-person house showers uses 20 gallons per day. Expand that rate, and you get 140 gallons per week, 600 gallons per month, and 7,300 gallons per year. Though these levels are lower than you’d get with a shower, that’s still a significant amount of water. Now, imagine that you could cut this waste in half by merely changing the head of the aerator on your shower. Change them on your sinks, and you can save even more money.

This step would help to drastically minimize the amount of water flowing through your septic tank every year, by as much as 3,650 per year according to the calculations above. Add that to the savings you’d get with your toilet, and you’d be saving 18,250 gallons of water from flowing through your septic tank. Put into perspective, that is 3,650 showers – or 10 showers per day over the course of a year – and a similar amount of toilet flushes. That kind of savings is almost astronomical and could put money in your bank book and protect your septic system at the same time.

Decreasing Washing Machine Water Use

The washing machine is another appliance that ultimately ends up producing a lot of wasted water in your home. For example, a typical load may use as much as 5-6 gallons and sometimes even more. The unique thing about washing machines is that they have settings designed to minimize the amount of water that you use and work to ensure that you don’t need septic tank pumping too often.

You’ve probably seen these settings on your washing machine before and may even regularly use them already. However, many people either don’t understand how to use these settings or use them improperly and waste a lot of water when washing their clothes. These settings include options such as load size, the water temperature, and the stained level of your laundry.

For example, you can choose an efficiency machine that lets you select load size as accurately as possible, sometimes down to the weight of the load. This step helps you minimize the amount of excess wastewater in your septic tank and helps reduce how often you need to get septic tank pumping. The exact amount of water that is saved will vary depending on other factors as well, including choosing the proper soiled level for your laundry instead of always selecting the most soiled options.

Most of the time, your clothes will need a light washing because they aren’t likely to be that soiled with dirt or other materials. Even if you have a reasonably large load – with the washer set to the proper washing level – you don’t need to set the soiled level that high. Only set this level as high as possible when your clothes are truly dirty. This situation includes if your clothes have a lot of sweat on them or if they have been stained with dirt or grass due to outdoor playing and other types of fun.

Work With Our Experts

As you can see, this process of pumping a septic tank can be a lot easier if you take the time to improve your home’s efficiency. Doing so will decrease the amount of excess wastewater that you produce daily and ensure that your tank doesn’t get too taxed. Just as importantly, these techniques can help to save you a lot of money by creating a more efficient plumbing system that doesn’t waste as much water. And most are quite easy to implement on your own without the use of professional help or expert installation.

So if you live in Iowa City, Iowa and want septic tank pumping that is efficient and easy to handle, please don’t hesitate to contact us at Brown Concrete & Backhoe to set up a free inspection appointment. We will come to your home, check out your septic tank and drain field, and give you an idea of how efficient you are handling your excess wastewater. We can then help to pump out your tank and can even provide advice on how to make your septic system and plumbing more efficient. We look forward to working with you on this project.