Balancing septic tanks down under. 

When asked to install a small sewage treatment system for a 2 bed-roomed house, just outside Brisbane - Australia, we knew we would need to be really innovative. Something we had not tried before.

Septic tanks and soakaways

The property was considered very clayey and all existing septic tanks and soak aways were pretty much useless.  During the rainy season, there was surface water everywhere, and some of it was not nice stuff.

The prefabricated house was on concrete piles, and the floor level was about 1m above the ground. The objective was to get wastewater through the plant, all gravity, to the disinfection.  From there treated water would discharge directly onto the lawn area, under " gravity feed " conditions.

Balancing

- the process of leveling high peak flows (morning and evening)  and low flows (when everyone is at work, or sleeping). This is important to maintain the correct biological process.   Normally we would have a small submersible pump , gently feeding the bio-reactor. 

But  . . .  could balancing be accomplished without this pump? And would the new design / technology avoid any negative effects of peak loads?

 Yes -  Scarab did it - by adapting the environment.

And -  the plant increases it's capacity during peaks, which gives the bacteria more time (retention period) to biologically process the water.

Have you ever thought that adding another lane to the freeway, just for peak hour traffic, would be impossible? We did just that.