Most of the towns we cover have too much room. Barnstead has one corner with almost none. The Locke Lake Colony plan went on record in Belknap County in 1966 and dropped several hundred house lots around two small ponds — small lots, small tanks, and an interval that has very little to do with the number you read online.
The colony was drawn up as a camp development. That’s the part that matters sixty years later. Lots were cut close together because nobody expected the buildings on them to be lived in past Labor Day, and the tanks that went in matched the buildings — modest, cheap, adequate for a family that showed up eleven weekends a year. Then the winterizing started, one house at a time, and it never stopped. Insulation under the floor. A real furnace. Somebody’s daughter moves in year-round with two kids and a washing machine. Every one of those upgrades doubles what the tank sees. Not one of them makes the tank any bigger. We have opened covers on colony lots where the house has been full-time since the Clinton administration and the tank underneath is the original camp tank, and the owner was genuinely surprised to hear that was unusual.
Locke Lake is 149 acres and about ten feet deep where it’s deepest. Half Moon feeds into it, it lets out toward Webster Stream, and eventually all of it ends up in the Merrimack — Barnstead is one of the few towns up here that drains south instead of into Winnipesaukee. Shallow water shows its nutrient load faster than deep water does, which is why the state has bothered to monitor a small private pond with no public access. We’re not going to lecture anybody about that. But if you own around there, the pumping schedule is doing two jobs, and the second one shows up as weed growth in front of somebody’s dock in August.
Getting a truck in is its own conversation. The colony roads are private, some of the turns were laid out for a 1966 station wagon, and there are places where the maple branches hang lower than a loaded truck stands. None of that is a problem if we know about it. It is a problem at eight in the morning with a tank waiting. So when you book, tell us the road, tell us whether we need a code or a call to somebody at the association, and tell us if the last outfit that came out had to back the whole way down. We’ll bring hose and plan the route.
The rest of the town is a different job entirely. Out on 28, out toward the Parade and South Barnstead and the roads running down to 126 and 107, you’re on an acre or three, the tank is a normal size, and the NHDES figure of every two to three years is a fair description of reality. Worth knowing about Barnstead: of roughly 2,395 housing units here, about 516 are seasonal. Call it one in five. In Alton it’s closer to one in two. So most of this town is somebody’s actual house, running seven days a week, and the intervals reflect that.
If you own in the colony, find out this winter whether the state has an approved plan on file for your system, and what tank size it lists. Twenty minutes of paperwork. It settles the argument about how often you need us, it tells you what you’ve got before something goes wrong, and if you ever sell — or ever need a repair permitted — that plan is the single most valuable piece of paper attached to your property.
Two numbers decide it: how much liquid capacity is under the ground, and how many gallons a day the house sends down. Everybody wants a schedule. What you really want is that ratio. A 1,500 gallon tank serving two retired people is a different animal from a 750 gallon camp tank serving five, and the calendar can’t tell them apart. This is why we measure sludge depth on every job and write it down — after two visits we can tell you what your house actually does instead of what the average house does.
On site the work is the same wherever you are in town. Both covers come off, not just the one over the inlet. The tank goes empty to the floor — sludge, crust, all of it, because leaving the solids and taking the water is the oldest shortcut in this trade and it accomplishes nothing except a lighter truck. With it empty we can see the baffles, see whether the inlet tee is still hanging where it belongs, see whether there’s effluent standing in the outlet line that shouldn’t be there. That last one is the early warning on a field, and you only get to look for it while the tank is down.
Then we backfill, put the covers back the way we found them, and tell you what we saw in plain words. If everything’s fine you’ll hear that it’s fine. If something needs watching you’ll hear what, and roughly when, and what it costs — not a scare and not a sales pitch. We’d rather have the pumping work from this town for the next twenty years than one oversold repair.
A standard 1,000–1,250 gallon tank runs $300–$500, pumped out and looked over while it’s open. Add for covers that have to be dug up, a second tank or a pump chamber, or a long hose pull from wherever we can safely park — which on some of the tighter colony roads is out at the pavement. You get the number before we start, not on the invoice.
No. Not the Parade, not Center Barnstead, not South Barnstead, and nothing in the colony. Every building in these 45 square miles handles its own wastewater on its own lot, and there’s no plan on any town warrant to change that. It’s worth saying out loud because a lot of general septic advice online is written for places where hooking up to a main is the eventual endgame. Here the system in your yard is the endgame.
Not every few years, no — but not never, either. A tank works on time as much as volume; solids settle and compact whether or not anybody’s in the building, and the bacterial action slows way down in a cold empty house. Four to five years is a fair schedule for a genuine summer-only place on the colony or the Suncooks. What gets people is the year the family reunion happens, or the year somebody rents it out for eight weeks. That season counts as two.
Yes, and we do regularly. The roads are private and narrow in spots and there are turns we take slowly, but a pump truck has been getting down them since the place was built. What we need is a heads-up on anything unusual — a gate code, a washed-out shoulder, a neighbor who parks tight to the road. We carry enough hose to reach a good distance from wherever we can sit safely, which handles most of it.
Common, and not a crisis. We probe for it, and we’d rather spend twenty extra minutes finding it properly than guess and tear up your lawn. Bring anything you’ve got — the closing folder, an old approved plan, a sketch a previous owner left in the cellar. On colony lots the recorded 1966 plan shows lot lines but no tanks, so it won’t help; the state’s approved system plan, if there is one, will.
More than a single tank, less than double. If you’re on a pumped system — and a fair number of the lower lots around the water are — the pump chamber needs emptying too, and that’s a good chance to hear the pump run and check the float. Tell us it’s a pumped system when you book so we quote it right the first time.
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