This is interesting, only from a personal perspective on my own septic system for my home....
Sorry for the long story but I was having trouble with my septic system which started (actually stopped flowing out) filling up my septic tank after only a few weeks....
This was occurring more often and I was blaming the runoff water coming from my street which I thought was flooding my yard, thus saturating to the point that no sewage water was getting out to my leach field....
I build barricades to limit sheet flow coming into my yard as best I could, to no avail, my tank was still not flowing out....
Actually after the 2nd pump out, I noticed water was flowing into my tank!
I live out in the country (north Atlanta) and have two 6 in city water mains that run in my front yard, as well as a 24 in CMP that feeds a small stream next to my home....
At first I thought the city's water mains were leaking....I had water flowing inside of the CMP that I saw flowing into the stream....I called the city and they were nice to test the water flowing into my stream, and this was during a time where it had not rained for over a month....at first the city said it may be an underground stream, but after testing the water, it showed definite chlorine as city water should have....
The city came out again and crawled into the culvert for over a hundred feet but could not see where the water was coming in from....after that they came out several times with various testing equipment to see if they could find a leak before tearing up my lawn, which I appreciated....
After pumping out my septic yet again, I told the tech that the water looked very clean coming into the tank....
That's when the light turned on in my head and I turned off my water service for a day and went back out to check my stream & corrugated metal culvert which now had no water coming out of it....
Thus after additional searching with Tempo Transmitter (of buried wiring used for sprinkler valves) I finally found that bad sprinkler line/valve that had failed (unfortunately water was not coming to the surface) which was placing a significant load under my lawn, flooding my leach field which never gave it a chance to saturate into my surrounding soil....
Sorry for the long story but sometimes it is a simple solution....all is well now since I repaired the leaking sprinkler line!
Richard Morales, M.Sc., P.E., F.ASCE
Director of Engineering
Fabricated Bridge Products
m: 404.275.6430
e: RMorales@...