Growing up in the rural Midwest, having a septic tank systems connected to your home isn’t that unusual. Years ago, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of how they worked. Simply pump them every 3-5 years and they’ll keep working until they don’t. Right?...Wrong!
It was only after I owned a park full of septic tanks that I finally learned it’s the biological ecosystem that’s the key to a long-term, problem free, septic system. Eventually I even became a Nebraska Licensed Master Installer for septic systems.
Just like anything, septic systems need some simple maintenance to work properly and last for decades. Afterall you can’t expect something to last for 50 years, under the harsh environment that some tenants can put them through, without a little maintenance.
In today’s modern world we use laundry detergents, body soaps, bleach, and other chemicals to help keep each of us healthy. They do this by killing the viruses and bacteria that we are all exposed to everyday.
While they do a great job, they also don’t discriminate when it comes to killing the beneficial bacteria and enzymes that are meant to help us. Unfortunately, if you own a septic system, it’s these very products that can cause a septic system to fail prematurely once they are washed down the drain.
Because the proper maintenance of your septic tank systems is so vital to ensuring you get several trouble-free decades from your system, in this blog I’ll be discussing a septic treatment product I’ve used for years. It’s called Bio-Safe One.
I’m not an owner, nor do I have any affiliation with their company. Instead, I’ve simply been a customer of Bio-Safe One since 2007. Over the years I have been so impressed with Bio-Safe One that I’ve always recommended it to people when the subject of plumbing issues come up.
You see, 2007 was when I first started experiencing a lot of plumbing backups due to grease in our mobile home park’s plumbing and septic systems. Just like a lot of park owners, at the time I remember thinking my tenants must be pouring a lot of greasy food items down their drains. I was also concerned that so much grease going into our aged septic systems could cause our system’s drain fields to fail prematurely. This potential expense was a huge worry for me.
After doing some research I came across Bio-Safe One and noticed they advertised that their products helped clean an oil spill back in 1989. The Alaska spill was caused by the grounding of an oil tanker called the Exxon Valdez. At the time, it was all over the news because it was such a big deal.
Because of the grease concerns of my septic tank systems, I wanted to know more about their products. I called and spoke with Chris who is a Bio-Safe One Senior Field Tech for their company. He explained to me that the various products offered by Bio-Safe One are live, reproducing enzymes, that multiply quickly and digest the organic contents of the system.
After the conversation I decided to give Bio-Safe One a try on one of my park’s 24 septic tanks. This way I could personally verify their products worked before spending the money to treat all 24 tanks. I originally purchased just enough of their liquid Bio-112 to give the chosen “test” tank a “medium shock” treatment since it wasn’t failing but was about 35 years old at the time.
I also purchased a box of their powdered B.O.S.S product. I wanted to try it on a few of my mobile homes that repeatedly seemed to have clogs due to grease near the kitchen drains.
Shortly after receiving everything, I started the shock treatment of the septic tank, but set the box of B.O.S.S off in the corner of my shop.
Shortly after the steps were completed, we experienced a bad storm which required us to keep busy with roof repairs for about a month. During one of these busy days, I got a plumbing call from one of my problematic homes.
After snaking the kitchen sink line, and ensuring it was functioning correctly, I decided to pour two bags of the B.O.S.S product down the sink. I wanted to see if it would help reduce this tenant’s future calls. To my surprise the tenant called the next day and said the sink was backed up again.
Confused how it could be clogged again so quickly, I opened the cleanout to the sink’s plumbing line so I could snake it out again. Now I’ve snaked out a lot of plumbing lines over the years, but what was different about this time was that once I removed the cleanout cap, the smell was horrible! It smelled like really raw sewage!
You see, what I came to realize after seeing this cycle being repeated on two other problematic homes, was that the enzymes from Bio-Safe One were actually breaking down the built-up material within the pipes.
It was doing such a good job that the packed grease and debris was literally falling off the interior walls of the pipes in clumps! This is what caused the secondary clog. The horrible smell was from the enzymes breaking down all that organic material.
Once I realized this, I went to check my test tank. To my surprise, the curst layer in the tank was about an inch less than it was just 2 months earlier. That’s when I realized Bio-Safe One was a product we needed to immediately incorporate into our maintenance program.
You see, a lot of times, what causes the horror stories of septic systems pump outs, and premature drain field replacements, is that people don’t truly understand what takes place in a septic system or how to truly maintain it.
Instead, lots of folks believe maintaining a septic system only means pumping the septic tank. There’s also a common misconception you should pump the tank after a specific number of years. These general misconceptions can be very costly to a mobile home park owner when you have a few dozen tanks on site.
Without getting too deep into the science of it all, a healthy septic tank should have three layers of waste. A crust at the top, effluent liquid in the middle, and sludge at the bottom. When your crust and sludge layers become too thick, it’s time to pump the tank.
This is because the waste can no longer cycle through the system correctly and will instead start flowing into your drain field. Once inside the drain field, it forms an organic biomat which can eventually stop the liquids from absorbing into the ground, and instead start overflowing out your tank.
Determining when to pump your septic tank should be done by measuring the depth of these layers (relative to the total depth of your tank), rather than depending on a set number of years.
How long it takes for the crust and sludge layers to build up depends solely on the health of the ecosystem within your tank. When you continually have a strong healthy ecosystem of the right enzymes in your system, you can expect to increase the number of years between each pumping.
It’s also important to remember that each time you pump your septic tank, you’re also pumping out all the established bacteria and enzymes. That’s why it’s vital to rebuild your tank’s ecosystem right after you’ve had it pumped. This way it can start growing and breaking down the organic materials as they first start flowing into your tank, rather than trying to have the enzymes catch up later.
To determine exactly when your tank is ready for pumping, you should have your licensed septic professional measure the layers. They will use a sludge stick to inspect how deep each layer is within the tank. You can see an example of one on Wholesale Septic Supply’s website.
Back in 2007, once I personally saw how well the enzymes in Bio-Safe One were eating the organic materials in my testing, I knew that we had found a product that had the potential to save me a lot of expense in the future. However, I also knew just dumping a bunch of Bio-Safe One’s products down the tanks once, wasn’t the solution.
I had to come up with a solid long term maintenance plan to avoid prematurely replacing my drain fields. In our park I decided to implement my new maintenance plan in three steps.
First, since all our tanks had pretty significant crust and sludge layers, I decided to have them all pumped. This was just my way of ensuring we didn’t spend money on building a good ecosystem in tanks, only to see it all pumped back out a couple of years later.
Second, once the tanks were pumped, I had our team pour a bucket of BIO-112 into each tank. By doing this, we could immediately start populating our new ecosystem, so it contained a high concentration of the Bio-One Safe enzymes. This high concentration would also help start to break down any biomat, that has built up over the years, as the tank’s liquids started re-entering the drain field again.
The third step was my quarterly treatment plan using Bio-Safe One’s packets of their B.O.S.S product. This is where we saw the true long-term savings in reduced service calls. In this step I would have our team dump two packets of the B.O.S.S product into each home’s kitchen and bathroom drain.
Remember those detergents, bleach, and other chemicals that people use every day? Each time they enter your septic system, they kill off a portion of your good bacteria and enzymes that live in the pipes, tank, and drain field. By periodically replenishing enzymes back into the system, you ensure the ecosystem stays strong and healthy so that it can continue to grow and do its job correctly.
The reason we chose to treat our systems every three months, rather than monthly, was because it fit with our existing scheduled visits to our POHs (Park Owned Homes) for maintaining the HVAC filters and testing the fire alarms.
When we first started the periodic treatments, just like the problematic homes I originally tested, we had several initial plumbing calls right after the quarterly treatment. That’s how I knew my plan was truly working. After just a couple weeks, our plumbing calls due to hair, grease, and food clogs dropped almost to zero. In fact, it worked so well I even incorporated our traditional residential properties (on city sewers) into the new treatment program.
In the times we got busy and postponed our quarterly treatments by a month or two, our number of plumbing calls would slowly start to creep up again, until we got them re-treated.
Not only did our new treatment plan dramatically reduce the plumbing calls we received month-over-month, but we also managed to dramatically extend the times between septic tank pump outs, by several years!
Personally, I’m also convinced that by using Bio-Safe One regularly, we rejuvenated our 40 plus year old drain fields. This was proven after only having to replace two drain fields while we owned the park for 13 years. Those systems are still going strong today even as they now approach 50 years old.
I strongly encourage anyone that has septic systems, or a lot of service calls due to clogs, in their parks to visit Bio-Safe One’s website, view their video testimonials, or simply call Chris at 917-740-4955. This way you can personally see the results of Bio-Safe One for yourself. Chris is truly dedicated to helping people and will be able to answer any questions that you may have about Bio-Safe One.
Be sure to let Chris know you read about Bio-Safe One on MHParks.com.
Feed free to send your questions, comments, or stories directly to me at gwigington@mhparks.com.
