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Ain't municipalities great ? When you think about it, a septic system with a leachfield is a simple thing. Need soil that percolates well. Dishcharge line from the house to the tank and I forget the inner workings on a precast concrete tank, (baffle ?), dishcharge line from tank, distribution box with the plastic levelers in the lateral holes, so you can equally set the flow, all on a bed of stone and covered with red rosin paper, ( always thought that was a joke, I guess once the grass takes root you don't lose much soil into the stone after the paper rots, why not use a Mirafi type filter fabric, it breaths too, I dunno.... But if that's the cut off date and the code changes, with the cost differential going to escalate, as it always does in construction, I'd think it's a pay now or pay much more later decision. Clearly, it may be a very wise move to see what the code requires you to do now, to get this installed asap and signed off by the health dept. Locate your house, may need a surveyor to give you some offsets of the building footprint and an elevation or 2 ( benchmarks ) if they have time, have em do the property lines too or as much as they can do, most of them charge for a full day, worth it though, then just maintain them undisturbed, keep em painted so you don't lose them etc., when you are ready to do the house, your layout will be done. You can eyeball it too if a tight budget, make sure it's reasonably close to where you think the house will be, orientated properly, see if you can get and use the prints to locate it, and that you have slope from the leach field to the d-box, tank and house, be careful and check the code and make sure you are covered so you can get the sign off when it's done. Rent a rubbered tire backhoe, like a 420 CAT or equivalent, order stone, soil pipe/fittings, bag of mortar mix for patching around pipe if necessary, assuming you will have to submit a stamped drawing to the health dept. follow it and do the work yourself, have the hole ready for the tank, pre-cast guy will set it, on that get the biggest you can afford, check sq. ft. make sure you have minimum capacity, I did that here and on many jobs, seems to be a performance plus with some overkill on the bigger tank size. You can easily set your d-box, and laterals etc. be careful when backfilling after inspection, I prefer a dozer to backfill, but if there is a fair amount of fill on top as cover, a 420 size hoe won't crush pipe if you are careful. Backfill perpendicular to the pipe and keep the fill thickness up, not less than a foot. You will save some money, get 2 people to help, they go quick usually, we used to install 2 on long day sometimes, and backfill em later after inspection. Contractor needs 10% & 10% on top of material cost, plus the add in feature, ( how much they try and get beyond a reasonable profit ), you pay for machine, materials and your time, you should be able to install it in a day and beat any quotes, plus you learn something. Fill tank with water, backfill leachfield carefully, cap off all necessary ends, not sure if critters will bother it, 4" soil pipe might be kind of hard to chew on, so I'd not worry about it, at least you'll have the least expensive and less obtrusive system in already even if later repairs were an issue, which I doubt. If money is an issue, now is the time to hustle, take a loan out after preparing a reasonable estimate on your own, I'd have to check current prices to figure a system here, I'd like to think under $10,000 for one, if you do it yourself, certainly no more than that, $300 a month for 3 years + or - like a used car loan. Soil pipe is like $6.50 /10 ft. at H.D. might want to check a plumbing/pipe supply house for better pricing, local clean crushed stone prices, precast tanks, rental equipment, help for the day, surveyor is the gist of it. I see the guy across the street has a lump in his yard, he had no choice though, kind of screws up your yard I think. One thing that will clog a leach field is waste water from a washing machine, the lint is the culprit, here we used a seperate drywell tank for all other waste water, leaving the septic for just the toilet.
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