Building your own cesspit in Thailand

[farmerfloyd]

I have a 1000 gallon tank with a divider inside to keep solids apart and then it runs into leach field to 4 or 5 lines 60 feet long with gravel on top with angels hair on top of gravel that lets more water to evaporate then stays in pipe to soak in ground, it is 13 years old, pumped once this year, was like perfect, did not need pumping, bugs working overtime,But no soap from washer goes into septic tank, seperate. in Florida with high water table but sand so settles fast. NO smell, just 2 adults no diapers. ha farmerfloyd

[robd]

ok then, i am just about to start building in middle of nowwhere so need a cesspit/soak away, i want to use grey water for plants/trees etc but land is sloped down t oa natural water course which i dont want t opollute.
Have enough land but need t oknow size etc of cesspit, any ideas for family of 4? how many rings high,how many in line and what diam etc and then does grey water need a tank as well?? how big an area do you need for soak away? any help will be great cheers rob

[dirtydog]

I think you need to work out how much water you will be using perday, ie baths jacuzzis or showers etc, and also soil density and water table height.

[tsicar]

i did my own cesspit when i built my house, roughly to the spec. that dd has given. worked well for around two years, then.......
the night i was due to leave for bankok to collect my daughter at the airport (her first visit to thailand), disaster struck! shit smell and upon investigating, found the bloody thing had decided to back up and overflow. no chance to get it sucked out in time, so spent a few hours digging a 3 cubic metre hole and diverting the toilet pipe to it. due to leave in three hours, no time to concrete or close it up properly, so i covered it up with a couple sheets of that asbestos fibreboard and shovelled some soil around the edges. well, my daughter's visit went well, and so did the new cesspit, and since it was working, and in an area nobody ever ventured into, it kind of got forgotten about, and the boards got covered with a layer of dried bamboo leaves.
a few months later, i had to leave thailand because of the visa rule change, house boarded up , and not a thought about the cesspit.
i have a friend in the village (he posts on this forum), checking the place over from time to time, and a while ago he reported discovering a man-sized hole in the fibreboard where somebody had fallen in! he sed he did not bother to investigate further, since he was afraid of what he would find! shit surprise for some thai snooping on my property. if he is still in there, at least i will not have to source a dead animal to get the bacteria going!

[robd]

ok dd so how does one go about working this out without getting to technical,surely lots of you have done this sort of thing already so just an idea would be great!

and how big do you think i should go for for the black water cesspit??

thanks rob

[DrAndy]

as a rule of thumb, it would be good enough for 4/5 people to use three of those concrete 1 metre rings for the tanks in the ground, stacked on top of each other and stuck in a hole like this




you would make on septic tank (not cesspit) for the shit, and another one for the grey water. The shit water would overflow into the second grey water tank after processing. You may then have a third tank for it to overflow into and from this, percolate into the surrounding earth. It should not pollute anything by then as the bacteria would have cleaned it up.

If you wanted to use the water for your plants, then the third tank could be made waterproof and you could pump it out rather than letting it filter out

[robd]

ok all so septic tank, they can be done using same concrete rings??? or am i looking at buying1 of teh plastic ones? thanks
rob

[blackgang]

Buy one of the 2 chamber plastic septic tanks, that way there is a digesting chamber, and a runoff chamber and have them put in a leach field with a couple of leach lines with 4" perf pipe set in gravel and then covered over, they should be as long as you have room to make them.

[DrAndy]

yes you can use the all-in-one plastic tanks, but it works out more expensive. neater though

[sunderlandstephen]

Did you consider wrapping pond liner around rings before concreting

[Deris]

I found a few good sites on building a septic system for those still interested:
How to Construct a Small Septic System - wikiHow

and-

http://www.thenaturalhome.com/septicdesign.pdf

Hope you find these helpful.

With these 2 links you should be able to avoid the Sh!t Storm.