Advanced Onsite Wastewater Systems Technologies
Drawing on the authors’ combined experience of more than 30 years, Advanced Onsite Wastewater Systems Technologies explores use of these technologies on a wide-scale basis to solve the problems associated with conventional septic tank and drain field systems. The authors discuss a regulatory and management infrastructure for ensuring long-term, reliable applications of onsite systems for wastewater management. The book and its supporting web-site (www.advancedonsitesystems.com) are an information catalog for advanced onsite wastewater technologies. This combination offers tools that will help onsite wastewater professionals communicate effectively with each other and their clients, thus minimizing the confusion and misunderstandings often related to the use of advanced onsite systems.
The authors provide an overview of advanced onsite systems technologies and compare them to conventional onsite systems and centralized wastewater systems. They present key concepts for decentrali… More >>
Advanced Onsite Wastewater Systems Technologies
Tagged with: Advanced • Onsite • Systems • Technologies • Wastewater
I work for a CA jurisdiction which has approved a wide variety and number of alternative septic sytems. The challenges, particularly regarding onsite management AFTER installation, have been great. And the results–after wastewater quality testing of the final treated ‘product’–have been mixed.
Consulting sanitary engineers, septic installers, and environmental health specialists will want to have this title on the shelf.
Whether you’re formulating regs, diving into technical standards, requirements for aerobic treatment units, or creating policy and BMPs, this title will take you beyond the world of conventional septic system and into the ’stuff’ of engineered decentralized sewage systems.
For local sites with fast percolating sandy soil (which allows unwanted disposal of nitrate into a groundwater aquifer), the book has been useful in my own attempts to explore a design for a passive treatment disposal system in fast-perc soils: dosed effluent from the septic tank would enter a trench that would slow down percolation rate via imported, layered, loamy soils. A bottom layer of added carbon (sawdust for example) would be included for denitrification. Installed sampling risers would allow for trench bottom wastewater testing. No ‘whistles or bells’ to mess with, as one finds in this book for most engineered systems.
The only major drawback to an excellent book like this has to do with newly planned ’sprawl’ development served by these alternative septic systems. Many marginal rural properties with considerable septic restrictions can be theoretically developed with the alternative septic techniques covered in this book. Of course Planning Boards don’t have to approve new development served by alternative onsite wastewater systems. But if my county is any example, they certainly will. (Although the housing market fiasco we’re now in will slow things…for a while).
Septic engineers/designers are now touting alternative/decentralized sewage as an ‘ecological’ way to ‘treat’ sewage onsite (at great cost). Even though that site may have a freshly carved 2 mile road that leads to the top of a hill so that the ‘doctor’ can have his million dollar views atop a sandstone bluff with barely 4 inches of topsoil. Engineers, for the most part, are not thinking of sprawl served by septic.
See The Bulldozers in the Countryside for an example of old-style septic surburbia. Fast forward to sprawl served by ‘eco-friendly’ advanced onsite wastewater treatment systems.