Hello to all,
I'm a general contractor and have lurked on this forum for years when needing guidance on plumbing related issues, so thanks to this community for the intelligent and informative discussions!
I recently took a job building some glamping tents at an RV park in my area that I built a massive deck for this spring. They told me they had ordered kits from the Netherlands and it should be straight forward. I show up and realize that the three tents have bathrooms. "But there's already utilities on site" the guy says, "all you need to do is hook up to it." Yeah. Right.
So I get a machine out there and start tapping into the sewer lines (as a GC in Utah this is legal under my license). The first couple sites go smoothly, these sites are downstream of a whole row of RV sites, so we ran a bunch of water through the upstream RV hookup/cleanout before cutting into the pipe. Tapped into it with a 6" to 4" SDR wye, a street 45 fitting, then a chunk of SDR 4", a 4" to 3" fernco, and we are in business with schedule 40 3" for the main drain line going into these tents.
On the third site, we found a different picture when we cut the pipe. 2 1/2" of sludge stuck to the bottom of the pipe, even after running water down the cleanout for 30 minutes. Long story short, in a 300' run of the 6" sewer pipe, it is 32" below grade at the upstream side, and only 50" below grade on the downstream side. Much less than 1/4" per foot, and where we tapped in had very close to negative slope.
They have had lots of complaints about that area smelling like sewage in the past, so none of the maintenance workers were surprised. I called up the owner of the park to authorize getting someone out here to flush the line out, and he says "Oh this would be the perfect time of year to replace the whole run of sewer, how much would that cost?"
Which leads me to this forum to ask the question, is there another way to achieve adequate drainage to this sewage line? Because there is a whole mess of live high voltage wires buried in unpredictable ways by the previous owners of this park, and I am scared shitless to think of how many things I could mess up if I agree to take that job. Additionally, even if I took the job, the 6" pipe we laid would need approximately 75" of fall throughout the run, which would mean it would miss the pipe that it wyes into that then runs out to the county lines at the street, approximately 800 feet away.
I just barely started looking into sewage pumps, but I'm not sure how to add one to a system that has a cleanout every 35 ft for all the RV hookups, and not sure what the best way to go about making this sewer pipe drain better, both now and long term. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and ideas, I am looking forward to hearing what you come up with!
I'm a general contractor and have lurked on this forum for years when needing guidance on plumbing related issues, so thanks to this community for the intelligent and informative discussions!
I recently took a job building some glamping tents at an RV park in my area that I built a massive deck for this spring. They told me they had ordered kits from the Netherlands and it should be straight forward. I show up and realize that the three tents have bathrooms. "But there's already utilities on site" the guy says, "all you need to do is hook up to it." Yeah. Right.
So I get a machine out there and start tapping into the sewer lines (as a GC in Utah this is legal under my license). The first couple sites go smoothly, these sites are downstream of a whole row of RV sites, so we ran a bunch of water through the upstream RV hookup/cleanout before cutting into the pipe. Tapped into it with a 6" to 4" SDR wye, a street 45 fitting, then a chunk of SDR 4", a 4" to 3" fernco, and we are in business with schedule 40 3" for the main drain line going into these tents.
On the third site, we found a different picture when we cut the pipe. 2 1/2" of sludge stuck to the bottom of the pipe, even after running water down the cleanout for 30 minutes. Long story short, in a 300' run of the 6" sewer pipe, it is 32" below grade at the upstream side, and only 50" below grade on the downstream side. Much less than 1/4" per foot, and where we tapped in had very close to negative slope.
They have had lots of complaints about that area smelling like sewage in the past, so none of the maintenance workers were surprised. I called up the owner of the park to authorize getting someone out here to flush the line out, and he says "Oh this would be the perfect time of year to replace the whole run of sewer, how much would that cost?"
Which leads me to this forum to ask the question, is there another way to achieve adequate drainage to this sewage line? Because there is a whole mess of live high voltage wires buried in unpredictable ways by the previous owners of this park, and I am scared shitless to think of how many things I could mess up if I agree to take that job. Additionally, even if I took the job, the 6" pipe we laid would need approximately 75" of fall throughout the run, which would mean it would miss the pipe that it wyes into that then runs out to the county lines at the street, approximately 800 feet away.
I just barely started looking into sewage pumps, but I'm not sure how to add one to a system that has a cleanout every 35 ft for all the RV hookups, and not sure what the best way to go about making this sewer pipe drain better, both now and long term. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and ideas, I am looking forward to hearing what you come up with!
