Our home is only 1 year old. We have a problem with an odor in our house.  It seems to be strongest in the basement near the laundryroom.  We had the tank pumped but that only seemed to help for about a week, now it is back.  Should we call a plumber?  Betty C.    

Often in new houses you have an unfinished bathroom or laundry room that before the room is finished, the plumbing traps will dry out allowing sewer gas to come back into the house. In existing homes the problem may come from a seldom used bathroom.

Try pouring a ½ gallon of water down every drain in the house. When or if you get to a larger drain for a toilet, stick a wet rag into the pipe...make it a big one so you don't have to worry about it falling into the plumbing lines.

If that doesn't do it let me know and we can look at some other problem/solutions.

Good luck...Jim

A water softener.

Our water is very hard but I hear a water softener is bad for a septic system.  What can we do.  Lisa C.  

Water softeners can cause problems for 3 reasons:

1.-they can use a lot of water.

2.- the sodium can bind with certain types of soil sealing it off.

3.- the sodium can weaken the concrete in the tank.

The solutions are:

1.-Get a softener that uses less water when they regenerate and one that generates on demand...not a timer. Think about it, with a timer it will regenerate every few days whether you are using water or not (even when you are on vacation). A demand system will regenerate only when you use about 1,500-2,000 gals of water, or about once a week.

2.-There is a treatment (one of the few additives I recommend) that can repair the damage to soils from sodium called calcium polysulfide (Septic Seep) that costs about $50 (see page 3 of http://www.septicprotector.com/Productsandservices.html ).

3.-Install a mini septic system just for your water softener (link at the bottom of page 3 of http://www.septicprotector.com/Productsandservices.html ).

Should you go to the trouble of installing a mini-septic system for your softener? First, keep in mind that every cup of water that goes down the drain must go through the treatment process whether it needs it or not and that the discharge from a water softener is white water and does not need to be treated and any time you are keeping water out of the system [that does not need to be treated] is a positive...it's not a bad idea.

However, the urgency of this potential problem/solution will depend upon a few things...how good is your septic system and how many people are in the house? If you have a good septic system AND there are only 2 people in the house (which means you probably don't stress your system very much)...I wouldn't deem it a pressing necessity. On the other hand, if your septic system is maybe a little undersized, a more complicated and expensive engineered system and/or you have 6 people in the house I would strongly suggest it. You can do it yourself fairly easy on a week end. The nice thing about a mini-septic system like this is you can also put the discharge from your central air conditioner in it.

What I try to impress on people is...there are a lot of negatives you can do to your system and they will shorten the life of your system. However, there are a lot of positives you can do to extend the life of the system like pumping the tank every 1-3 years, conserving water/chemicals, putting an effluent filter in the tank and a filter on your washing machine, not flushing the wrong things down the drain, etc. These positives can minimize the negatives.

Good luck and let me know what you end up doing...Jim

PS. Do not put (even filtered) washwater into this type of system...it will kill it in a few years.