We're in the process of buying house. It has a septic system installed in 1991 along with pretty decent well water. It's a single tank with 832 sq. ft of drain field on 12" of aggregate. The system is supposedly pumped out every couple of years.
The sellers just pumped the septic tank out again as part of the sales process, and our inspector has come back with a report that the drain field is saturated right through the aggregate layer and that the drain field needs to be soil tested (and recommended notifying the municipal authorities to do the same) and the whole system replaced. The sellers called their own inspector, a local plumber, and he mentioned that it was running toilets that were causing the saturation in the drain field, and also noticed that there was no gray water in the field. He supposedly stopped the running toilets and will wait a few days and retest so that they don't have to replace the system.
What we're concerned with is that we don't get into a legal dispute with the sellers or otherwise get in trouble with the local municipal authorities on this. We're also wondering why our inspector might have failed to see these running toilets. Then again, we wonder if running toilets could really saturate that much of a drain field.
In any event, we're hoping someone here might be able to answer a few questions for us, and we're willing to go back and ask some questions if there's anything else that might be needed to properly answer this. At the end of the day, we don't want to spend $20k+ on fixing something that the sellers should. Thanks in advance.
The sellers just pumped the septic tank out again as part of the sales process, and our inspector has come back with a report that the drain field is saturated right through the aggregate layer and that the drain field needs to be soil tested (and recommended notifying the municipal authorities to do the same) and the whole system replaced. The sellers called their own inspector, a local plumber, and he mentioned that it was running toilets that were causing the saturation in the drain field, and also noticed that there was no gray water in the field. He supposedly stopped the running toilets and will wait a few days and retest so that they don't have to replace the system.
What we're concerned with is that we don't get into a legal dispute with the sellers or otherwise get in trouble with the local municipal authorities on this. We're also wondering why our inspector might have failed to see these running toilets. Then again, we wonder if running toilets could really saturate that much of a drain field.
In any event, we're hoping someone here might be able to answer a few questions for us, and we're willing to go back and ask some questions if there's anything else that might be needed to properly answer this. At the end of the day, we don't want to spend $20k+ on fixing something that the sellers should. Thanks in advance.
