Cavan offers model for murky world of septic tank inspection

TIM CLIFFORD, a Cork-based site assessor and owner of www.siteassessor.com, expects the system of national septic tank inspection to follow that of Cavan County Council closely.

He said the European Commission conceded that the bylaws in Cavan constituted an adequate legal mechanism for complying with the waste directive, and therefore excluded Cavan from the legal action taken against Ireland.

“I believe it will be a monitoring regime very similar to Cavan County Council, which is basically a visual inspection,” said Clifford. “What else can they do? We can’t tell you what’s going on underneath the ground.”

According to Clifford, where a site has no visible contamination, tanks will be given the green light — and a visual inspection could cost as little as €50.

Clifford rejects the argument that the Government will take the opportunity to raise extra revenue through the scheme: “A stealth tax is okay if you’re going to make money out of it, but I can’t see how anyone’s going to make money out of it.”

So far so comforting for owners of domestic septic tanks, but it is estimated that 120,000 tanks are contaminating surface water, and these will have to be remedied. The first issue that Clifford sees is that older septic tanks are unlikely to be compliant with the current code of practice for installing systems.

“If you go back 10 years, they’d have built a tiny chamber, they’d have no internal baffle wall, it’d be done out of concrete blocks, and there’d be no percolation area,” he said. “They’d come out with a four-inch outlet pipe, and just go into a soak-away full of stones.”

In such a system, the pipes can get blocked, and the porous concrete blocks leak constantly through the sides. In his professional opinion, he would say such a system would need replacing, since concrete block systems are not permitted today — but whether the legislation will require that is unknown.

Even with more modern systems, there can be problems if corners were cut when they were installed. In a house build, the septic tank is usually one of the last items to be installed, and dwindling funds may tempt self-builders to cut costs. “We call it ‘the kitchen effect’,” said Clifford. “How in God’s name can they say that system out there is going to cost €7,000 to install, when they want granite inside in the kitchen?”

Bio units are an alternative to septic tanks, recommended when the subsoil of a site is unsuitable for a septic tank, but Clifford warns that they are far from perfect. “The number of bio units that are failing around the country is unbelievable,” he said.

The cost of replacing a system can be substantial. The price for a greenfield installation of a septic tank starts at €5,000, or €7,500 for a bio unit, according to Clifford. The cost of providing a percolation area where the subsoil is unsuitable for a septic tank can be higher.

Clifford is involved in a site with very bad soakage, where the planning permission requires a 300 square metre raised mound percolation area, at a cost of €25,000.

A side-effect of the delay in the legislation on septic tanks is an atmosphere of uncertainty for anyone intending to buy or sell a rural house. However, estate agents have reported that few house buyers are aware of the impending inspection regime. One agent compared it to the building energy rating (BER), and said awareness of that system only began to grow once the system was in place.

However, Tim Clifford said in the last 18 months, house buyers’ engineers, and especially the banks, are homing in on whether waste water systems are compliant. He said the banks do not want house buyers returning to borrow more money if remedial work being required.

“My last three jobs have been for upgrades to make the house saleable,” said Clifford. “My friend came to me because his mother could not sell her house, because the sales fell through on three separate occasions, all on waste water.” Clifford got them planning permission to upgrade the system, and found a buyer, pending the completion of the works.

Whatever the content of the new legislation, its introduction will end a period of uncertainty for rural dwellers.

However, it is likely that controversy and opposition will continue to dog the issue.

“We all knew that there was an issue while the previous government was in,” said Clifford. “I could never understand why they didn’t come in with some initiative, and now I know why, because it’s an absolute political nightmare.”