Waste not, want not" is an excellent motto for dwellers in
the country, especially where water is concerned.

SEWAGE SAFETY

[Illustration]

_CHAPTER X_

SEWAGE SAFETY

Among the problems which his miniature municipality brings to the
country house owner is the unromantic but necessary one of sewage
disposal. In a suburban area it is merely a matter of connecting the
house to the street main and paying higher taxes. With the country
house, each owner must cope with the question for himself. He cannot
leave it to chance or delude himself that any old system will serve.
Some hot August day when his house is filled with guests, the
makeshift disposal system will suddenly cease to function and an
otherwise tactful guest will ask whether that queer smell is just part
of the regular country air or what.

Of course, nobody thinks of disposing of household waste by piping it
to a brook or letting it flow down a sandy side hill some distance
from the house. Those were the methods of the ignorant and
unscientific past. The means of disposal recommended by sanitary
experts are those in which the wastes undergo a bacterial fermentation
which finally renders the sewage odorless and harmless. It can be
accomplished by a septic tank or a tight cesspool. The latter with its
two chambers is really a variety of the septic tank itself. The first
vault is built of stone or brick laid in mortar and covered with a
coat of waterproof cement. With both supply and overflow pipes below
the normal level of the liquids, beneficial fermentation takes place
in this compartment before the liquids pass over into the second
chamber from which they gradually seep into the ground. Such an
installation calls for more excavation and construction than a septic
tank and, since it accomplishes nothing that cannot be done with the
latter, is only used where there is not enough ground area for the
disposal fields of a septic tank.

The latter is an air-tight cylindrical or oblong container placed
below ground, in which raw sewage purifies itself by the inherent
bacteria. The first stage takes place within the tank and the second
in the porous pipes that constitute the disposal fields. From the
moment household wastes enter the tank, fermentation begins its work
of reducing them from noisome sewage to harmless water. Both intake
and outlet pipes extend below the level of the contents, with a baffle
plate across the center which prevents d