Do you know of any natural septic tank treatments?

Have you ever used a natural septic tank treatment that you would recommend?

I am looking to give our septic tank a little pep talk and help the good bacteria do their thing. I see a gajillion treatment products online. Many tout to be all natural. I'm looking to see if anyone had tried any of them? Or are there simpler options that I simply have not thought of? Do they even work?

Wow, i learned something new that people buy treatments.  I didn't know that was a thing.

I was always taught to empty the half a container of old yogurt from the back of the fridge down the toilet every other month or whenever the yoghurt, sourkraut, sourcream, or other forgotten fermented food goes nasty.

There have been times when we bought a 1 ltr plane yoghurt to flush down the toilet if the feild isn't smelling great to get us through a few weeks until the guy can bring the big truck.  It often works well enough the guy didn't find anything wrong when he finally showed up.

But now we live with only people who are septic trained, we have less problems with unfriendly (like not septic specific toilet paper or strong cleaning acids/alkili) stuff going down the drain.  So we haven't needed to give it a boost.

I'm a no treatment kind of guy.

I try not to send anything to the septic that could throw off the biological balance and haven't had issues in years. The only time I have seen references to treatments is from sources that are trying to sell me the treatment.

My system is old (1920-1960?) but functions well.

I've not lived with a septic tank, but grew up in a community where a lot of people did (including my grandparents). A bit of wisdom I heard and stuck in my brain was that if you were having problems/ some people said every x number of years, you should chuck something dead in the septic tank. This was generally road kill or the guts of something that had been shot.
I have also recently started a bokashi bin for food waste, and from my research beforehand, the liquid given off can be great for boosting the microbial action of septic tanks, and can even unblock drains.

My dad was also one to toss something dead into the septic tank, once it twice/ year. I switched from toilet paper to bidet & cloth, nothing goes in but bodily waste. The number one best thing, after a very strict 'no chemicals' rule,  (according to the septic guy who emptied the tank at my rental, the last time I needed that's done in 1999!), is to control the amount of water going in. The more water that goes down, unnecessarily, the more diluted the beneficial bacterial become, the more troubles you'll have. I've followed his advice ever since, and haven't needed my septic tanks emptied, in the 3 homes I've lived in, since.

r ransom wrote:Wow, i learned something new that people buy treatments.  I didn't know that was a thing.

I was always taught to empty the half a container of old yogurt from the back of the fridge down the toilet every other month or whenever the yoghurt, sourkraut, sourcream, or other forgotten fermented food goes nasty.

There have been times when we bought a 1 ltr plane yoghurt to flush down the toilet if the feild isn't smelling great to get us through a few weeks until the guy can bring the big truck.  It often works well enough the guy didn't find anything wrong when he finally showed up.

And sometimes people just forget about fermented food as an option :) I was thinking maybe kefer or sauerkraut, but I don't make those and buying seemed expensive. We do go through a good amount of yogurt though, and occasionally they go bad in the back of the fridge... I will keep this in mind.

Ali Green wrote:... A bit of wisdom I heard and stuck in my brain was that if you were having problems/ some people said every x number of years, you should chuck something dead in the septic tank. This was generally road kill or the guts of something that had been shot...

Carla Burke wrote:My dad was also one to toss something dead into the septic tank, once it twice/ year...

This is why I ask questions :), I would never have thought about throwing some roadkill down there... but I can see how it would help. I'm going to keep this in mind too.

Timothy Norton wrote:I'm a no treatment kind of guy.

I try not to send anything to the septic that could throw off the biological balance and haven't had issues in years...

This is what I aim for... unfortunately I live with people who do not think the same way as I do... and when I have my kids... it's a bit more than the system was designed for. So I end up needing to do some extra work to try and avoid some extra pumping.

A family member reminded me, we also buy yogurt for the septic feild if someone's on antibiotics.

Often we talk with the dairy guy in the grocery store.  Here the can sell up to the best before date, but policy says they have to take it off the shelf two days before.  We can usually get old stuff half price.

Matt, surely something must be wrong if your tank cannot absorb a boost in numbers ?

John C Daley wrote:Matt, surely something must be wrong if your tank cannot absorb a boost in numbers ?

I suspect there is an issue... but I am hopeful it is merely a lack of biology and can be remedied easily.

I have heard to put yeast into your septic system

I have never done that so I don't know if that is effective.

Like Timothy I believe septic health begins with how you take care of it and what you put into it.

I take it the tank has not been pumped out if you do not know where it is.
If thats the case, that may be the real issue.

This was interesting.  I especially liked the comments on using fermented foods after they have aged out.  I grew up with a father who started his own excavation business.  Quite a bit of our work was related to septic systems.  By the time I was 12, I was catching the concrete blocks he dropped into the hole to construct dry wells and cesspools.  My father was a proponent of flushing small handsful of spoiled hamburger into the system on a regular basis.  When he passed and I returned with my family to the farm, I found that he had not exchanged the temporary 500 gallon steel septic tank.  Some visitors apparently flushed most of a toilet paper roll in one flush and it clogged the inlet to the tank.  Being saturated, the snake was unable to tear it apart.  So...I decided to enhance the system as a whole.  I had a plumber route all grey water to the kitchen cesspool (yep, caught and placed every one of those concrete blocks).  That avoided any water except through the stools.  Laundry was sent already into the drainage for the basement into another cesspool I had built.  Now, we have a 1,000 gallon concrete septic tank and non-degradable line which has not burbled in over 12 years.  BTW, due to careful use, the 500 gallon tank had lasted from 1957 until around 2011.  We did have a large piece of concrete on the top of it to prevent sudden surprises to anyone driving over it.

I can say with confidence, that proper use and maintenance along with ensuring the water can flow away can perform wonders in the waste disposal category.  

One caveat.  If the septic tank flows into a drywell, the drywell may plug as the grease particles exit the tank into the well.  That grease will plug most soil types after a while and does not degrade easily in the ground.  We installed a ditch filled with stone that allows the flow to move at least 160 feet into the road ditch, by which time the flow has been cleansed quite well.  Old time engineering claimed 50 foot of sand filter could make septic outflow drinkable (not wanting to check that claim), but water flowing over stone can be a wonderful natural filter.

We've had drain problems since we moved into this house eight years ago. A few months ago, we had the septic tank pumped, hoping that might help (it hadn't been done in many years). The guy who was pumping said that you could buy the expensive septic tank treatments (Rid-X, I think? Or something like that). Or you could just flush in a package of yeast once in a while. He said, it's the exact same thing, and a lot cheaper.

My brother finally crawled under the house for me a few weeks ago, and strapped up the long run of drain pipe from the sink to the bathroom, on the opposite side of the house - over twenty-five feet. It had saggy spots in it (this house was built by a farmer for his own family, and presumably the same farmer added the plumbing sometime later - it's not original to the house). It must have been those saggy spots that were the problem, because it's worked fine ever since!  So if you are having chronic drainage problems, if snakes and chemicals and so on don't fix it, take a look at your drain pipes and make sure they are installed properly.

I never thought of putting fermented stuff or yogurt in the septic. We have lived on our homestead 13 years this month, and no issues with the septic. The house was abandoned 3+ years before we bought it. We pipe the washing machine grey water directly out the wall into a handmade drainage ditch and don’t flush toilets unless it’s needed. You’d be astonished at the amount of lint in the drainage ditch from the laundry. I believe this is a large part of many septic tank problems, the lint. Especially if it’s polyester. Also I never rinse paint, henna, or clay in the sink. Have not needed the septic serviced, and don’t use any treatment.

Our septic guys said to just flush the contents of a big box of baking soda down the toilet.

Thanks to the oil embargo in the 1970s I ended up going from being a mechanic working for a septic tank company. Oddly enough, I loved that job.

There's no additive that can help a tank do what it does better than it does left alone.

Here's what does help:

Cut down on how much grease goes into the system. Detergents and soaps are major contributors here.

Filter the laundry water to keep all the lint from clothes from washing out into the system. This stuff plugs up your drainage faster than you think and easily goes right through the grease trap and out to the drainage. Some newer setups have a filter in the trap to catch this stuff.

The tank should be pumped out every 4 - 5 years. The main thing here is to get rid of the grease layer floating on the top before it gets so thick it overcomes the trap/tee leading out to the drainage and lets the grease go into/ plug up the drainage.

Pumping  is getting extremely expensive now so you may want open the tank and check grease levels yourself or get it pumped once and get an idea of how much grease accumulated over time and project that out to how long you can go before needing to pump again.

https://www.plumbingsupply.com/how-a-septic-system-works.html

I am an outlier - I use septobac. Not as often as the package says, but occasionally. My parents started using it in the 90s, including for reducing the odour in RV sewage and in an, ahem, 'unapproved' septic at a weekend home, after being recommened it by their sptic pumping guy in the 90s... Definitely made a difference in the second 2 use cases..

One of those things where i dont know if it works, since we have never had septoc issues... But, we've never had septic issues, despite not pumping our septics or being paranoid abot what goes in them. I spend maybe $20 on septobac a year, which is cheap insurance. I had the septic pumped when i moved in 2 years ago, will probably do it again next fall to see how it looks. Mine isnt accessible in the winter (hatch is under a foot of dirt)  which makes me a bit more cautious. A cousin's septic system failed midwinter, and that was a nightmare.

Calling your' local "Honey Dipper"  to pump the tank clean is the best thing a person can do.   Every 2-3 years is what I have read before...  Frequency will depend more on the number of people using the facility and what actually gets sent down the drain.  Food scraps, grease, hair, fabric products and any cleaners or sanitizers that go down the hole make a difference too.

Enzyme treatments from the local hardware store work well if the tank is healthy and the leach lines are not plugged up.    

Letting things go too long causes leach lines to fill with solids and fail.  It is then that the ever popular "glug glug glug" happens in the toilet when the bathtub drains or you try to wash your' hands and face in the sink...   The system is full.  It will be plugged up and no drain cleaner, drain snake or enzyme treatment will fix it.  At that point it requires flushing the leach lines if you can find them after pumping the tank of "Puddin"...   More often it is easier to simply lay new leach lines and connect to the existing tank.

Digging down to the lid of my tank and installing a 10" inch wide pipe with a concrete lid was the best thing that I have ever done.   Easy access for the tank truck and for about $300.00 every few years.   I can poop as much as I want without worrying about the system backing up.

We have also put baking yeast in our toilets and flushed them, and it seems to have worked. The septic tank hasn't been pumped for over two decades.

r ransom wrote:A family member reminded me, we also buy yogurt for the septic feild if someone's on antibiotics.

Often we talk with the dairy guy in the grocery store.  Here the can sell up to the best before date, but policy says they have to take it off the shelf two days before.  We can usually get old stuff half price.

When I read this, it occurred to me that this would be an excellent source of livestock feed in the winter when the dairy cow slows down her production. 😁

While a properly working septic tank is as efficient as anything, far too many systems are plumbed into most, if not all gray water and laundry.  Note, in my previous comments, I noted that our laundry was plumbed into a completely separate cesspool.  Laundry wash water is very hard on a working septic system because it overloads the tank, often diluting the bacterial colony that is trying to make a living on the carbon in the system.  Heavy dilution can shut a system down significantly if not entirely.  Use of specific materials can reintroduce bacteria into a system in crisis.  It does not matter what that material is so long as it produces a strong anaerobic bacterial colony.  My father's suggestion for using ground meat that is beginning to decay works because it is a good source of anaerobic bacteria.  Yogurt or fermented matter may also work, but I like rotten meat better.  (It also helps remove a potential source of difficult odor.)

The grease that remains after digestion will flow out of the outflow and will clog soil in either drywell or leach field.  That grease is insoluble and is the product of digestion in the septic tank.  No matter what you do, unless you use a special oxygen charge system in the secondary tank to convert the grease, it will get out there.

Nicholas - I hope that your tank was concrete and not metal or even fiberglass.  Placing a concrete manhole is a good idea unless it might overload the top and cave it in.  Ensure there is some preventive barrier around the top to keep heavy equipment off it.  Any heavy vehicle or machinery driving over the top can punch the riser straight into the tank and create a very expensive repair.

Kathleen:  I agree septic lines have to have some grade, but ensure that the grade is not too much.  Building codes set the minimum slope for sewer lines. These standards prevent common drainage failures. For 2 to 3 inch pipes: 1/4 inch per foot minimum. For 4 inch pipes or larger: 1/8 inch per foot minimum - International Plumbing Code (IPC) accepts these standards. A septic line is part of a floating carrier system.  If the grade is too steep, the water floating the solids down to the tank will outrun the solids.  This will let the semi-solids slide along the pipe.  What happens over time is that the residue on the pipe wall will build up, looking almost like rings on a tree. The pipe will pass less and less material and finally plug completely.  We dug up plugged lines often and saw that exact issue.

I always think diversity when it comes to septic tanks… diversity of organisms.  Rotting things qualify!  Compost too!  Some soil if it is from a vibrantly healthy patch.  Not a lot though….

Yeast packets and dairy products have limited variety so they’re helpful if what they provide is what is needed.

And sanctity…. I have developed habits around the idea that the mix in the tank is the home of millions of microbes.  Maintain a viable habitat for those organisms that call it home!

Whey and kombucha are also microbe rich.  And lots of probiotics contain millions of a variety of microbes per dose.

For anyone who has cared for ruminants, the balance in the tank is as fragile as the rumen.  Only deposit what the tank is ready for.  Feces are a constant source of reinoculation, but the occasional commercially available products won’t hurt, and can be helpful, a tuneup as it were.

Probably every body here knows that corporations can call something “flushable” that is going to cause problems, and honey dippers who haven’t been in the business long may repeat the simplest recommendation… it has to be pumped every year.  That’s easier than trying to explain about which modern products should not be used.

I would not want to drink the water filtered through 50 feet (or was it yards) of sand, but that old timer was probably talking about the world he was familiar with, before the wide array of laundry, personal care, and cleaning products… and before microplastics, and the alphabet soup of molecules released from plastics.

I think I remember at summer camp in the 50s we were taught that “water clears itself” in a certain number of feet.  Of course they were referring to “wild” surface water.

One of the treatments done to fix the bacteria is to pour down karo syrup down the toilets.           I remember that was a fix a company did when there was  a chemical that go into the septic system, that is what they did.       I would imagine  pop syrup would also work...

When we moved to our current property in the country it was our first experience dealing with wells and septics and all the things that come with country living. So trying to learn to do the right thing I used to buy Septi-bac and throw that down according to the directions on the box. Septi-bac is organic at least and there aren't any ugly additives. I thought I was doing the right thing. Until I had my first visit from the guy that makes a living pumping these things out. He told me NO! don't be putting that stuff down there. Just leave it be. He said that the septic will find it's own natural balance of bacteria and organisms and that by adding more bacteria you can do more harm than good. So I stopped doing it. In the years since I've not had any problem, I only pump out maybe once every 5 years, and he told me last time that things down there are all good. So money saved not buying that stuff all the time. Unless you have a problem I'd say leave it be. If you do have a problem then the best solution might be just to get it pumped out and start fresh.

Connie:  I would counsel prudence in all things.  Pumping a septic tank can cut both ways.  Once a tank is empty of the sludge and water, the tank becomes quite buoyant.  My father strongly counseled all customers who had gotten a new tank to provide a couple of hundred gallons of water ASAP to prevent the tank from popping out of the ground.  And, they can, especially if the soil is not fully packed around the tank.  Once the tank has been in the ground for a year or two, the tank is less likely to lift, but I remember a nearby gas station where they decommissioned an underground fuel tank and built a new structure over it.  That tank had been in the ground for decades and it still rose during a high ground water period and lifted the entire corner of the building.  So...even when a tank has been down there for a long time, high groundwater around it after a pumping event might be quite spectacular.  I suppose it would be one way to find a missing tank in its entirety instead of just the clean out.

Richard Henry wrote:Connie:  I would counsel prudence in all things.  Pumping a septic tank can cut both ways.  Once a tank is empty of the sludge and water, the tank becomes quite buoyant.  My father strongly counseled all customers who had gotten a new tank to provide a couple of hundred gallons of water ASAP to prevent the tank from popping out of the ground.  And, they can, especially if the soil is not fully packed around the tank.  Once the tank has been in the ground for a year or two, the tank is less likely to lift, but I remember a nearby gas station where they decommissioned an underground fuel tank and built a new structure over it.  That tank had been in the ground for decades and it still rose during a high ground water period and lifted the entire corner of the building.  So...even when a tank has been down there for a long time, high groundwater around it after a pumping event might be quite spectacular.  I suppose it would be one way to find a missing tank in its entirety instead of just the clean out.

Good advice I'm sure, thank you! So far so good. The septic is a fair distance from the house so if it did lift it wouldn't affect any structures. It was in the ground already 5+ years when we moved in and we have now been here 14 years.  It's also on a high spot on the property so ground water shouldn't be too much of a risk here. We are in Prince Edward Island and we get a fair bit of rain and thaw in the spring.  The soil here has a lot of clay so I'm confident that it's firmly packed after all this time. Fingers crossed we never have any issues but good to know and keep in the back of the mind. At least it's a proper septic. Some places here on the island have pretty rustic septics....back in the day they were using everything from buried cars to you name it as a septic. When we were getting water backing up into our sump pit we had to do some digging to find where it emptied into. Followed the pipe all the way out to the woods where it was emptying into a large bucket filled with rocks buried amid the trees!  That was fun, dug for hours before we found it. sheesh!  And don't get me started on the interesting plumbing configurations in this old lath and plaster farm house. :)