First thing to settle at nine o’clock at night in Wolfeboro: is this your tank, or is it the town’s line? Takes about five minutes to work out, and it changes who you should be calling.
Wolfeboro is one of the few towns around this lake that runs its own water and sewer utilities — roughly 14 miles of sewer pipe, 243 manholes, seven pump stations, and a treatment plant permitted for 600,000 gallons a day that typically handles somewhere near 385,000. If your house is in the village and tied into that system, a backup may well be on the town’s side of the connection, and the town has people for that. If you’re anywhere in the other 48 square miles of this town, there’s no line in the road and it’s your tank. That’s us.
Sorting it out is quicker than people think. Do you get a sewer bill from the town, or just a tax bill? Is there a cleanout standpipe near the foundation? Then listen to the house. If the lowest fixture in the building — basement floor drain, first-floor toilet, the shower on a slab — is the one coming up, and the upstairs bath is fine, the trouble is downstream of everything and that means the main line out or the tank. If one bathroom is bad and the rest of the house drains normally, it’s that branch and it’s a plumber, not a septic truck. And a toilet that gurgles every time the washing machine drains is telling you the line out is restricted, well before anything overflows.
Then there’s the season, which in this town is not a small factor. About 6,400 people live in Wolfeboro. Late July it’s more like 25,000. We take calls every summer from houses where nothing is broken at all — the tank is simply full, because a system sized for two people has had eleven in it since Thursday, running a dishwasher, three showers a day and beach towels through the wash. That is a full-tank problem, not a failure, and it’s a completely different conversation and a different bill than a failed field. If you’ve got a houseful, say so when you call. It changes what we bring and where you land in the day.
And say if you’re on a long private drive or a narrow shore road. A loaded truck is heavy and a hundred feet of hose only reaches a hundred feet. Knowing that at the time of the call beats discovering it in your dooryard.
If your Wolfeboro place is a rental, tape a card inside a kitchen cupboard: where the tank is, that there is a septic system and not a sewer, and no wipes, no grease, no feminine products. Guests assume city sewer because most people live on it. That single card prevents more August emergencies than anything else we can suggest.
Once we’re there, pumping the tank down relieves the backup in most cases, because an overfull tank is far and away the most common cause. But the tank being empty is also when we can finally see what happened. Before we leave you’ll get a straight read on whether this was a full house on a holiday weekend or the first symptom of something that needs fixing — and if it’s the second, what it looks like and roughly what it runs.
Same-day emergency response is priced above a scheduled pump-out, because it is one. You’ll hear the number on the phone before the truck rolls, including anything we expect for access or for a lid we have to dig for. No surprises invented in your driveway at eleven at night.
Start with the bill. If the town bills you for sewer, you’re on the collection system and a backup could be on their side — call the town’s water and sewer department, they run their own crews. If you only get a tax bill, there’s a tank in your yard and it’s yours. If you genuinely don’t know, call us anyway and describe what’s happening; we’ll tell you in a minute or two which one it sounds like, and we won’t charge you for pointing you at the town.
Call and find out rather than assuming. Holiday weekends in this town are the reason we staff the way we do — the Fourth and the weeks around it are our heaviest stretch of the year, and it’s not a coincidence. If we can be there tonight we’ll say so. If the honest answer is first thing tomorrow, you’ll get that instead of a maybe, plus what to do overnight so it doesn’t get worse while you wait.
Until the tank’s down, no — every gallon in makes it worse, and with a house that full it adds up fast. Once it’s pumped you’re generally back in business, though we’ll usually suggest spreading laundry and showers out over the day rather than everybody at once. That alone gets a lot of summer houses through a week they wouldn’t otherwise get through.
It’s not an emergency tonight, and it is your system telling you something. Gurgling means air is being pushed back up because the line out is restricted — a tank near the top, a partial blockage, a sagging pipe. It generally gets worse rather than better, and it tends to declare itself on the weekend you have company. Get it looked at on a Tuesday and you’ll pay Tuesday rates.
In most cases pumping ends the emergency the same day. Whether it stays fixed depends on what put you there. If the tank was just overdue or overloaded, that’s the end of it. If solids have been escaping past a broken baffle for years, or the field isn’t taking water, you’ll be back here in a few weeks and we’d rather tell you that tonight than let you find out. We’ll show you what we saw in the tank and let you decide.
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