Canterbury has been rationing building permits since the late seventies. Which means the septic tank under your lawn is, more often than not, older than the people living over it.
Every house in Canterbury is on a private septic system. There’s no treatment plant, no mains, nothing to hook up to — the town’s draft master plan says wastewater is handled “exclusively” through private systems, and that’s the whole story. But that’s true of Loudon and half the towns we work in. What’s particular about Canterbury is the age of what’s in the ground.
Back in the late 1970s the town put an annual cap on new house permits — one of the first in New Hampshire to do it — and it has never come close to hitting that cap since. Half the land is zoned five-acre agricultural. So the town never got the subdivision wave that reshaped a lot of central New Hampshire. Roughly 2,400 people, most of them living in houses that were already standing when the cap went on, sitting on tanks that were sized, dug, and set for a family that moved out thirty years ago.
Then in 2019 Canterbury started allowing accessory dwelling units. Good policy for a town that’s getting older — the in-law apartment over the barn, the parents downsizing into the ell while the kids take the house. Bad news for a 1,000-gallon tank that was already carrying a full household. We’re now pumping a lot of tanks in this town that got a second kitchen and a second bathroom plumbed into them without anybody asking whether the tank noticed. It noticed.
If you don’t know when your tank was last pumped, and you bought a house in Canterbury from somebody who’d owned it forty years, assume the answer is longer than you’d like. Have us open it once and measure. After that you’ll actually know.
First we find it. On the older places up around the Center or out along Northwest Road there’s rarely a design on file, so we probe, dig, and pull the cover. If the cover turns out to be a slab of concrete with no handle and a crack across it, we’ll tell you, because that’s a lid on its last few openings.
Then everything comes out. Liquid, sludge, the mat on top — the whole tank, not the easy top third. On these older tanks we pay particular attention to the outlet baffle, because concrete baffles from that era rot off at the waterline, and once the baffle’s gone, solids go straight to the field. We check it with a light and a mirror. Takes a minute. Saves a leach field.
We measure sludge depth before we leave and give you the interval that fits your tank and your household — not a number off a brochure. If there’s an ADU on the system now, that interval gets shorter, and we’ll say so plainly.
And if we dug more than a foot to reach you, we’ll suggest a riser. Once. After that it’s your call.
A standard 1,000–1,250 gallon tank runs $300–$500. A deep dig, a tank that’s never had a riser, a two-compartment tank, or one that hasn’t been opened since the permit cap went on will run above that — you’ll get the number before we start, not after.
No. Not the Center, not Shaker Village, not down by the exits. Private well and private septic on every lot in town. If a listing says otherwise, somebody copied the wrong template.
Yes. An ADU is a second household on the same tank — more water, more solids, often a second washing machine. Figure on every two years instead of three, and if the tank is a small older one, we should talk about whether it’s sized for what it’s carrying at all.
Almost always, though it may have gone in decades after the house did. What we sometimes find on the oldest hill farms is a steel tank or a dry-laid stone cesspool instead of concrete. We’ll tell you what you’ve got when we open it, and steel is a conversation, not a pump-and-go.
Probably. Canterbury has a lot of dirt road and a lot of long, pitched drives, and we run plenty of hose. Tell us what you’ve got when you call. In April we may ask to wait a week rather than leave ruts in your drive.
We come down I-93 and off at Exit 18 or 17. It’s a regular stop for us, not a special trip.
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