Cottage Q&A
QUESTIONOur septic tank is buried and we're not sure where on the property it lies. How do we find out?
ANSWER
The details of your septic system may be on file at your local health unit or municipal office. Then again, they may not - but in most jurisdictions these are good places to start looking, says Andy Dubchak, a public health inspector with the Kingston, Frontenac, and Lennox & Addington health unit, which has records on file starting from 1969. To search there, you'll need the name of the owner at the time the system was installed (it should be in the title records) and the legal description (lot and concession number) of the property. There is a $50 fee.
In the District of Muskoka, information on septic systems is now filed with the municipal building departments. Kelly Earley, building administrator for the town of Gravenhurst, says her department's septic records begin around 1959. Write a letter to request a search (it's also $50) and include the legal description, 911 civic address, your tax assessment roll number, and the names of current and previous owners. If your system isn't on record (and many aren't), the place to start tracing the tank is your basement or crawl space. Find where the main sewer line exits the cottage, and you'll know the tank's general direction and approximate depth. Newer systems often have a clean-out opening near this exit - in which case, Dubchak says, you can remove the cap and feed a garden hose into the line until it hits the baffle in the tank. Measure how much hose went in, and you'll know how far from the house the tank is.
It isn't always that easy, of course, especially if the cottage is old. The septic pump-out pros we spoke to said they sometimes find older tanks buried deep under subsequent landscaping, and occasionally discover them directly under a cottage deck or even an addition. Tanks can sometimes be located by using a rod to probe the soil (a golf club with the head cut off makes a good probe) or a metal detector (since even concrete tanks have metal handles on the pump-out lid). Stephen Scharman of All-Star Septic in Port Sydney, Ont., has actually found quite a few tanks by witching for them with a pair of bent wire coat hangers.
Leon Little, owner of A-1 Septic Service in Huntsville, is working on an electronic chip that he can flush down the toilet. When it's stopped by the tank baffle, it should signal its whereabouts, allowing him to retrieve it when he pumps out the tank. The device isn't perfected yet, so in the meantime Little suggests that another way to find out where your tank lies is to ask around the lake about who installed the septics. Often the same contractor did many of the systems and will have a record of where yours is. (When Little has to search for a tank before servicing it, he always gives the owner a diagram for future reference.)
If all else fails, you'll have to find the tank the hard way, by digging down to the sewer line at the cottage end, and continuing to dig along it until the tank appears.
* Published in the April/May 2004 issue of Cottage Life
