All good blogs start with a candid conversation about waste water. Said no one. Ever.
So please forgive me for kicking off the party with this topic!
This is the first time we’ve been tasked with creating a wastewater (septic) system. Being surrounded by farmland and miles away from town is an awesome feeling. However not being able to just hook up to city sewer is definitely more complicated.
As we’ve been planning the silo house for the past two years there’ve been two big questions marks that always stopped us from pushing forward.
1. Can we even have a septic system on our narrow lot?
2. How will the design and connect the “middle part” roof (the “middle part” will house our foyer, bathroom, mudroom, laundry room,, and storage room) to the two silos?
First things first – the septic needs to be solved for this project to move forward.
Thankfully here in Teton Valley we have a great public health official and expert who’s been a great resource in helping us plan. Which is really lucky, because the Idaho state technical manual for septic systems is a whopping 382 pages long!
We signed up for a “Septic Site Evaluation.” Our guy came out to the farmhouse silo property. He told us how big the tank needs to be (900 gallons) and how big the field needs to be (maximum of 500 square feet). We eyeballed the locations for each component and found the place to dig our test hole.
The test hole is 10 feet deep, we weren’t up for digging it ourselves so we’re getting a backhoe and operator coming over today! I won’t count this EXACTLY as “breaking ground” on the project, but it does feel great to officially have our silos ball rolling.
From today we’ll know our soil type and our exact setbacks from the creek and the exact size of the field. Keeping our fingers crossed for soil type B or C. Soil type A would be a bigger hurdle, but nothing insurmountable.
As Pete always tells me: “Everything is possible, it’s just time and money.” Hopefully we’ll have a suitable soil type and be able to install a simple system.
Plan B will be a complex septic system that might include pumps, mounds of earth and who knows what else.
Plan C will be a composting or incineration toilet, which would mean no water under pressure running into the silos – so that would be a bit tricky in more ways than one. But it’s there if it comes to that. Hopefully it won’t. The user experience would really suffer.
So to wrap up this first blog post. Thank you so much for reading, I hope you’ll have an easy time designing your septic system for a small or even a tiny home. As we build ours I’ll be keeping you updated on what we do and how we do it, so stay tuned for more where this came from!
2021 Update: Septic Achieved!
