Projects
Treatment Plant, Finedon, Case Study
We were approached by our customer in Finedon, Northants, who had a treatment plant already, but it was borderline-compliant, and in any case he wanted to move it as part of an extensive reorganisation and redesign of his garden.
Survey work in advance
As part of the initial survey we downloaded the local Water Authority Asset Plan to make sure there wasn’t a public sewer in the Highway, within the vicinity of the property. Quite often a customer will have a septic tank or treatment plant dating back many years, but a public sewer may have been laid in the Highway since. Under a new law that came into force in 2020, if a public sewer exists within a reasonable distance, you cannot install a treatment plant instead.
We also took some levels on site to ascertain the proposed treatment plant inlet and outlet depth, as these are determined by the levels of the existing underground drainage on site. With these to hand, we ordered the treatment plant from Marsh Industries, we’ve had a relationship with Marsh for over 20 years, and they are our go-to supplier for all treatment plants & pump chambers etc.
With the treatment plant dispersing into a watercourse, we had to make sure that we could get the fall by gravity, from the outlet on the treatment plant, to the watercourse. Unfortunately our survey put the outlet level at the very bottom of the watercourse, which would not have been suitable – in the event that the watercourse rises during wetter months, water from the watercourse would have flooded the treatment plant and put it beyond use until the water level went down again.
We installed an 8-person treatment plant, with the property being a 5-bed house. We were lucky enough to find the ground to be very dry, despite us being at the bottom of a hill and next to the stream. The excavation work was done on Day 1, and the treatment plant was delivered on Day 2. We concreted a base for it and installed the plant with a full concrete surround. The customer did not want to lose use of his sewerage system, and therefore we kept his old septic tank in operation for as long as we could whilst the work was being undertaken. The plant was in and concreted by the end of Day 4, after which we did the switchover and laid the pipework to the watercourse. On Day 5 the customer had his septic tank emptied one last time, after which we put it beyond use by filling it with inert material from the treatment plant excavation, and capping it off.
We instructed an electrician to commission the new plant, and as a pumped-outlet unit, it had an external blower under a green hood, for which we had to form a small concrete base. The electrician installed a feed to this concrete base, which in turn fed the blower within the hood arrangement. From here a second feed was laid into the plant, for the pumped outlet – when the level in the final chamber of the plant gets to a certain level it pumps out to the watercourse.
We installed a carbon vent for the plant, which we fixed vertically adjacent to the blower housing. With the new plant connected up and working, and the old septic tank decommissioned, we set to reinstate the areas of the garden where we had been working. The garden was being landscaped after this phase of the project, and so minimal reinstatement was required.
Our customer was kind enough to leave us a 5-star review on Google afterwards. Click here to see our Google reviews
