Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

Been here nearly eight years and our pozzi negro has never smelled nor required emptying. House has been up for getting on forty years now.
We have young children so lots of baths and showers and up until a few years ago everything went into to pozzi negro. I was getting a little concerned about the amount of water getting flushed into it, particularly after a couple of winters with lots of rain, so I re-routed everything except the toilet.

I dug a trench a couple of feet deep and about 50 feet long and lined the bottom with hardcore. Then I placed a large diameter (63/75mm) irrigation pipe along the length of the trench with the end capped off. I drilled holes (maybe 20mm diameter) all along the length of the pipe, then placed old roof tiles across the top to provide a cavity. Then I covered the whole thing in plastic sheeting and backfilled with topsoil to hide it. Now the bath, shower, sinks, and washing machine all get fed into this drain. So far there are no smells or blockages and everything seems to work well.

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

Sounds spot on.:thumbsup:

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

Not in my experience.

All our grey water goes into the septic tank and no smells or problems in nearly 9 years.

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

I agree - everything goes into my septic tank and I don´t put those bacterial "tea bags" in either. Ten years use and my visitors put their paper down there to.

Davexf

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

We have also diverted some of our grey water into the garden where it irrigates some of the fruit bushes. I also put enzymes in the toilets once every 3 months basically because I hope that it helps keeps smells out of the pipes as the old drains were concrete channels which had split and have been replaced partly with plastic pipes and also because when they put the camera down we were told there were a lot of bends slowing the flow of water down from the house to the pozzi, don't know if it helps or not but other than that everything goes down and I use normal cleaning stuff. I once stayed in a house in France which had really bad problems despite using special cleaners, no paper, regular emptying and enzymes so I was worried when we decided to live in the campo but so far the only problem has been a blocked pipe and that was a problem because there were no roding points.

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

I use them regularly, but how can one tell they actually do any good? Does anyone have any 'scientific' or other evidence that they're actually effective.
Read also that Coca Cola is good also, but don't know if that's one of the myths surrounding the product!

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

WARRA load of old sh7t, lol


Sounds horrible.

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

We never had any problems with ours but I was just getting concerned with the actual volume of water that was being flushed into it. I was worried that it wouldn't be able to soak away fast enough and that someone would get unlucky when trying to flush the toilet. Also our pozzi negro has no access point so we would have to break into it in order to empty it.

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

That is one of my worries we have no access point. Would an ordinary plumber have a camera to take a look to see if we have anything blocking?

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

When we wanted one with a camera we found that the local ones with shops and a couple of vans had them but the small one man bands did not, also they were all busy. So we ended up phoning one in the nearest city and got a quote for the camera and an hours work because we knew we had a problem. Unfortunately when he turned up he became the problem because he had a huge jack hammer and just wanted to use it to smash open our pozzi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We insisted that he got his camera out, he then got his hose stuck in a 90 degree bend and got his club hammer out to smash the bathroom floor!!! So we wish we had waited and got the local man out who would have been more used to pozzi's than the boy from the city! Good Luck.

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

That is terrible and quite frightening.

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

we had the last laugh, the blow back when he cleared the obstruction was spectacular and he was covered! We are glad we had the camera as we are now more aware of potential problem points in the run off to the pozzi, where the bathroom floor had to be taken up we do now have a proper roding point we also know that the pozzi itself is fine and working well. Lesson learned was to stick to the local people but we panicked because we had a blockage and the toilet wasn't draining

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

quite understandable

and we now know where you got your name from
:hysterical:

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

Purchase/shoot a Rabbit or Hare. Eat Rabbit/Hare put skin, head and guts in tank! That will do it. It did for me; for twenty years on my Farm.

Re: Soakaway Cess Pit
 

Dead sheep or Dog does the same..