Trenches and pipes and septic tank

Before we could make any progress on the house this week, we had to work on getting the utility pipes up the hill from the old house near the road to the new house site 300 feet up the hill. The excavator dug the trench a while back, which then got filled with pipes.

We laid down the green (SDR-35) septic drain pipe ourselves, with cleanouts every 80 feet. Our electrician laid down the pipes for the electric service, phone, and future fiber and cable. (We don’t have fiber or cable in this part of the Vermont, but we’re hoping it will arrive within the next couple of years and wanted to plan for it.

The septic system is a bit unusual. There’s already a septic tank and leach field down by the old house, but 300 feet seemed too long for a pipe running down to it from the new house. So we had a new septic tank installed up by the new house. Its outlet runs down to the hill to the old tank in the green pipe shown above.

Installing the green SDR-35 drain pipe is a bit of a challenge and we had no clue how to do it until we got advice from a friend who used to install it for a living. The stuff isn’t glued together like the so-called “schedule 40” heavy white drain pipe. Instead, the green pipes have a rubber gasket at one end, which is widened slightly. You fit the narrow end of the second pipe into the gasketed end of the first pipe. This is the challenging part. You have to grease the ends of the pipe really well with special pipe lubricant, then somehow drive the two pipes together. This can’t be done by hand pressure alone. You have to place a piece of wood over the open end of movable pipe, then slam an 8-pound sledgehammer against the wood, driving the pipe home into the fixed pipe. Sometimes we also used a big crowbar instead of sledgehammer. If you have to cut a pipe (inevitable when you’re installing cleanouts), you have to bevel the cut end of the pipe with a rasp so that it will slide into the rubber gasket of the other pipe more easily.

At this point, most of the utility trench is now filled in, except for the parts that have to wait for the electrician to finish up things and for the french drains to be installed around the foundation perimeter.

Now the weather is going to be rainy for a few days, so we’re not going to be able to work outside much. We may try to rig up a temporary tarp shelter in the basement of the new house as a kind of workshop for assembling the floor beams.