About 1,080 houses in this town. Close to half went up before 1970. The number that came with a drawing of where the septic system is would fit on one hand, and we’d have fingers left.
Andover’s housing stock is old in a particular way. It isn’t the 1980s-subdivision old of a town nearer the interstate; it’s the East Andover Village Center Historic District old, farmhouses along Route 4 old, mill-village-that-lost-the-mill old. Potter Place still has the 1874 depot standing. When a house from 1850 gets sold, the listing says “private septic” and that is, most of the time, the complete extent of what anyone knows. The system might be a proper concrete tank and field put in during a 1978 renovation. It might be a cesspool. It might be a tank with a pipe that runs to a stone-lined pit that the original owner called a leach field, and the town never saw a permit for any of it because permits weren’t a thing when it went in.
The buyer’s situation, then, is that the biggest unknown on the property is also the most expensive one to be wrong about. A general home inspector will run water and flush toilets and note “septic appeared functional at time of inspection,” which is a true sentence that tells you nothing about the field. A tank with 30 years of sludge in it and a field on its last legs will pass that test on a dry day in September. It’ll fail in the spring, after you’ve closed. We open the tank, pump it, look at the components, probe and load-test the field, and locate everything — so the report says what the system actually is and how much life it has left, not whether the toilet flushed.
Waterfront changes the rules. Anything developed on Highland Lake, Bradley Lake, or the other ponds that falls inside the protected shoreland has to have a septic site assessment done before it can transfer — that’s RSA 485-A:39, and lenders and closing attorneys in Merrimack County know to ask. The assessment is about whether the lot could support a compliant system if this one failed: soils, setbacks, slope, well locations. On the Highland shore, with the setbacks what they are, the honest answer on some lots is “not easily.” That doesn’t kill the sale. It changes what the house is worth and what the buyer should budget, and it’s a lot better to know at inspection than at the first backup.
Buying an older place in Andover? Ask the seller, in writing, for the last pump date and who did it. If the answer is a shrug, budget for the inspection as a certainty and a pump-out on day one. If the answer is a name and a year, that’s the single most encouraging thing you’ll learn about the house.
Start with a map. We locate the tank, the d-box if there is one, the field lines, the well, and the neighbors’ wells where we can find them, and we measure it all off the house. For a good share of Andover’s older houses this is the first drawing that’s ever existed of the system, and it goes in the report whether or not everything else checks out. The next owner, or you in ten years, will be glad of it.
Then the tank. Material and condition — concrete, steel, or something older — size in gallons, the state of the inlet and outlet baffles, whether the liquid level is where it should be, and the sludge and scum depths before we pump. We pump it as part of the inspection, because you can’t see the walls or the baffles through three feet of black water and because a pumped tank is the only way to watch what the field does when it’s asked to take water. That’s the load test: a measured amount of water run in, and we watch whether it goes where it’s supposed to or stands in the trenches. We probe the field for saturation while that’s running.
You get it in writing, with photos of the open tank and the d-box. The report says what the system is, what shape each piece is in, what we’d expect its remaining life to be, and what a fix would cost if something’s already going. If the property is inside the shoreland, we do the RSA 485-A:39 site assessment as part of the same visit and fill out the state form. One trip, one bill, and a buyer who knows what they’re buying. Sellers hire us for the same thing before listing, and it’s a smart move — a known system with a clean report sells; a mystery in the side yard gets negotiated.
A full buyer’s or seller’s septic inspection in Andover runs $450–$700, which includes locating, opening and pumping the tank, the load test and probe on the field, and the written report with the drawing. The RSA 485-A:39 site assessment for shoreland properties adds a modest amount on the same visit — we quote it when you call. If the lid is deep or the system is unusually hard to find, we say so before we start digging, not after.
A home inspector ran water and watched it go away, which is what they’re able to do. They didn’t open the tank, didn’t pump it, didn’t find the field, didn’t probe it. On a 1960s Andover house that’s been on the market since the owner passed, the tank can be three-quarters sludge and the field half-sealed and every toilet in the house still flushes on inspection day. The failure shows up in April with a full house. A real septic inspection is the difference between finding that out for $500 now and $20,000 in the spring.
No. About 125 houses in Andover Village get water from the Village District, and that’s all the district does. There’s no municipal sewer anywhere in town, so a village-water house has a septic system like every other house here — often on a smaller village lot, which makes the field’s condition matter more, not less. We inspect village-lot systems all the time and the map we hand you is worth having on a lot where there’s not much room to put a new one.
It doesn’t pass or fail the system that’s there. It looks at the lot — soil type, slope, distance to the water and to wells, available area — and reports whether a compliant replacement system could be built on it under current rules. The buyer signs off that they’ve seen the result. On some Highland Lake camp lots the answer is that a replacement would need a design workaround, and that’s a real fact about the property that belongs in the price. We fill out the state form as part of the visit.
Inspect first. If the system is sound, you go to market with a report and a drawing, and there’s nothing for a buyer to negotiate on. If something’s wrong, you find out on your own schedule, fix it or price it, and it doesn’t blow up a deal two weeks before closing. Andover houses, especially the older ones, sell better as a known quantity. A buyer looking at a mystery in the yard on a 1950s house is going to knock money off just to cover the uncertainty, and usually more than the fix would’ve cost.
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