Butcher Shop Septic Connection
For a USDA meat processing facility, e.g., the butcher shop, it is required by regulations that the process water such as that from the sinks and floors of the cutting room have a separate piping system from the welfare waste water (e.g., toilet) until they exit the building. This is to reduce the chances of contamination which improves sanitation.
If you have been following our adventure you might remember the maze of DWV pipes down in the trenches below our floors. Connecting them all up today was the cumulation of all of that work and planning.
You might wonder why was this saved for such a late date. The reason is simple, I didn’t want sand, dust, concrete, metal filings and other things to get washed into our septic tank and leach field. Thus we got all the dirty work of construction done before I made this final connection between the butcher shop’s plumbing system and the septic tank. Otherwise I could have ended up with a couple of feet of dust settled into our tank and clogging up our leach field. Everything in its time.
We did a test flush and the system was inaugurated all the way to the septic tank.
Outdoors: 74°F/60°F Mostly Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 67°F/63°F
Daily Spark: A vegan eats vegetables. A carnivore eats meat. An opportunist eats their enemies.
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
I see purple primer at the joints. The old inspector in me approves. I also see you allowed for some motion in your ground pipes with the flexible rubber connectors. Wise move in your land of freezing winters. That should avoid cracked pipes. Glad to see you making such progress and getting close to the end of your immense journey to vert intigration by bringing process on farm. We need more farmers doing this.
What is with the pink walls and where is all this piping? Is that insulation?
The pink is insulation inside the plumbing box where the pipes exit the building. The insulation is setup so that ground heat rises into the box during the winter but the worst of our cold weather stays out of the box. The pipes will still be insulated further as I do not trust the box to be sufficient alone to keep the pipes safe. I will also heat tape them so I can turn that on if necessary. Fortunately the water coming out of the building is relatively warm (up to 180°F) and flushes quickly down into the buried pipes and then the septic tank. Since it isn’t standing in the pipes it should not freeze.
Why ar there so many pipes?
All pipes lead to the connection box where I can adjust them as our needs change over the years as we build out the remaining parts of the facility. There is the Welfare vs Process division – those are the big pipes. Normally a facility merges all the different process pipes but I brought them out separately so that I can later handle Blood, Brine, Smoke, Compost and other Process water’s separately. This will let me customize the treatment of each waste water flow to handle them in an ideal manner rather than merging them all.
For example, brine has a high level of salt in it and that is bad for the septic tank bacteria. Smoke has the particulate matter from smoking that helps to preserve the smoked meats like bacon but again is not good for the septic bacteria which are living organisms who must thrive to do their job of breaking down waste water materials. The blood is high in BODs as they’re termed which put a high load on the septic tank because they use a lot of oxygen in the system – thus they’re better handled separately in a composting system with carbon.
Initially we won’t need all this specialized waste water processing but by bringing the pipes out separately I can improve the system in the future to better handle the different organics and inorganics (salts).
It is a very interesting plumbing design which is not very common. Does this septic connection have any type of disadvantage?
Complexity of separating each type of fluid for separate processing and a small increase in the cost of the pipes.
A classic post it is that stating on septic connected.
The USDA having a great job of what they have notice and they feel as like to be the exaggerated mode in a specific place.