A hundred and twenty-five or so houses in Andover Village get a water bill. Not one house in town gets a sewer bill. That gap is where tanks get forgotten.
Here’s the setup. The Andover Village District is a little RSA 52 outfit — commissioners, a clerk, a meter reader — that pulls water out of Bradley Lake and pipes it to Proctor Academy, the elementary school, and roughly 125 homes clustered around the village. Those folks get a bill. It comes in, they pay it, and somewhere in the back of their mind it registers as “we’re on town.” They are. For water. The pipe going the other direction, the one that leaves the house, goes about thirty feet into the side yard and stops at a concrete box. Same as it does in East Andover, Potter Place, Cilleyville, everywhere else in the 41 square miles. There is no municipal sewer in Andover. Not in the village, not anywhere.
Why we care: a sewer bill is a reminder. A water bill from a village district is, for a fair number of people, the opposite of a reminder — it’s reassurance that somebody else is handling it. We’ve pumped village tanks that hadn’t been opened in fifteen years, and the owner was genuinely surprised to learn there was anything to open. Meanwhile the numbers on this town’s housing are what they are. Census work puts something like 45 percent of the structures in Andover as built before 1970. A lot of those systems went in with a backhoe and a handshake, and the paperwork, if there was paperwork, is in a filing cabinet that got hauled to the transfer station in 1994.
One more piece, and it’s the one that ought to land. Bradley Lake is 170 acres and it’s a drinking water source. Not a pretty-to-look-at lake — a lake people drink. Whatever soaks out of a neglected leach field on the Bradley side is eventually somebody’s tap. NHDES says pump every two to three years. We’ll tell you honestly after we’ve looked whether your tank needs it that often, but for a house on that watershed we’re not going to argue for stretching it.
If you’re a Village District water customer, take the water bill as your cue instead of your comfort. Every time the meter gets read, that’s water that went into the house — and nearly all of it went out the other side into a tank you own. Write the last pump date on the inside of the cabinet under the kitchen sink. Cheapest reminder system there is.
We call the day before and confirm the window. Show up, walk the yard with you, find the tank. On a pre-1970 Andover system that’s sometimes the whole first half hour — grass grows differently over a lid, but not always, and the house’s cleanout doesn’t always point where you’d think. We carry a probe and a locator. If we have to dig, we dig, and we put the sod back so you’d have to be told where.
Then the whole tank comes out. Sludge off the bottom, scum off the top, liquid in the middle, all of it. There’s a version of this job where a truck pulls the liquid, leaves the heavy stuff sitting, and drives off in twenty minutes. That version costs less and does close to nothing. We measure the sludge layer before the hose goes in, because that depth against the tank size is the only real answer to “how often should I be doing this.” Anybody quoting you an interval without having measured is reading it off a brochure.
While it’s empty we look. Inlet baffle, outlet tee, effluent filter if there is one (if there is one, it’s probably clogged — almost nobody cleans them). We check the concrete at the waterline, where the acid eats it first. Then the lid goes back on, the hole gets filled, and you get a written record: date, gallons, sludge depth, what we saw, and the lid position measured off two things that won’t move. Foundation corner, well head, the big maple. So the next person doesn’t have to probe.
Pumping a standard 1,000–1,250 gallon tank in Andover runs $300–$500. The spread is tank size, how far we’re pulling hose, and whether the lid’s sitting at grade or eighteen inches under it. You get the number before the truck leaves the yard, not after. If we open it up and find something that changes the job — a rotted baffle, a second compartment nobody mentioned, a steel tank going soft — we stop and tell you what that costs before we go any further.
No. The Village District does water — it pumps Bradley Lake, treats it, meters it, and bills you for it. That’s the whole job. There is no sewer collection system in Andover, so there’s nothing for a sewer bill to pay for. Your wastewater goes into a tank on your lot, and the tank is yours to maintain. If you’ve been in a village house a while and can’t remember it ever being pumped, that’s worth a phone call before it’s worth a worry.
Could be concrete, could be steel, could be a rock-lined cesspool that somebody later called a septic tank because that sounded better. Andover has a lot of 1950s and 60s housing and all three show up. Steel tanks from that era are past their design life — they rust from the top down, and the first sign is usually a lid that gives a little underfoot. We’ll tell you what you’ve got when we open it. If it’s steel and soft, we’ll pump it anyway, then we’ll talk about the replacement calendar without pressure.
The Highland Lake Protective Association’s literature says three to five and NHDES says two to three, and both of those are general. The right number for your tank is a function of tank size, how many people are in the house, and whether there’s a garbage disposal feeding it. Two people in a 1,250-gallon tank with no disposal can run four years and be fine. A family of five in a 1,000 with a disposal should be on two. We measure the sludge every time, so after one visit you’ve got a real number instead of a range.
Usually. We carry enough hose to reach a tank from the road on most of the shoreline lots along Route 11, and where the drive is too tight for the truck we’ve done it from the neighbor’s with permission. What we won’t do is drive the truck across a soft lawn to save fifty feet of hose — that leaves ruts that outlast the visit. Tell us what the access looks like when you call and we’ll bring the right rig.
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