People have been summering in Wolfeboro since 1763. Which means a fair number of the tanks in this town are older than the rules that govern tanks — and nobody left a map.
Start with the sewer, because it’s smaller than people assume. The town runs about 14 miles of sewer pipe, 243 manholes and seven pump stations. Now put that against 48 square miles of dry land. The collection system covers the village and not a great deal else. Out past it — Wentworth, Crescent, Rust Pond, the back roads, the camps — every house is handling its own sewage in its own dirt, and always has.
Now the part that actually makes Wolfeboro different from the towns west of here. New Hampshire didn’t require anybody to get a septic design approved by the state until 1967. Before that you dug where the digging was good and you didn’t file anything, because there was nothing to file it with. Wolfeboro was already two hundred years into being a summer town by then. Governor Wentworth put his estate up on the lake that carries his name in 1763; the town was incorporated in 1770. A lot of what’s in the ground here went in long before anyone was writing it down, and then got added onto by three generations who also didn’t write it down.
So on a first visit to an older place we’re usually doing two jobs at once. Pumping, and finding out what you own. Is that a concrete tank or a cesspool. Is there a baffle in it or did that rust off in the Ford administration. One compartment or two, one lid or two, and is the second lid the one that’s actually been getting pumped all these years. We find single-lid tanks in this town that have had one end emptied for thirty years while the other end quietly filled with rock.
And the state record is thinner at the front than most people expect. From 1967 to about 1971 the catalog leans heavily toward systems within a thousand feet of surface water — which in a town with this much shoreline covers plenty, but not everything — and everything through 1986 exists on paper only. So when the search comes back empty, that isn’t a finding. It mostly means old. Old isn’t the same as bad. It does mean we go in with a locator and a shovel instead of a printout.
If you’re on an older Wolfeboro camp, ask us to sketch the system on the inside of a cupboard door or the back of the basement stairs before we leave. Sounds fussy. But these places pass to kids, get rented, get sold, and the one person who knew where the lid was is exactly the person who isn’t there the night it backs up.
First we find it. If you know where the lid is, that’s twenty minutes saved and we’ll say thank you. If you don’t — and on a place that’s changed hands twice since the seventies, usually nobody does — we trace the line out of the house and probe. Grass over a tank tells on itself in a dry August. Not in May.
Then it gets opened and pumped out completely. Liquid and the solids underneath, both ends if it has two, not a quick skim off the top to make the truck light. A skimmed tank looks exactly like a pumped tank from up at the house, which is why some outfits do it that way. You’d never know until the field did.
Empty is when the tank finally tells you something. We read the walls for cracking and root intrusion, check whether the inlet and outlet baffles are still there and still doing anything, and note how deep the sludge was when we started — that number is what sets your real interval, as opposed to the generic every-two-to-three-years the state recommends. A camp that runs ten weeks a year and a house with four people in it year-round have no business being on the same schedule.
Last thing, and it’s the part that pays you back: we write down what’s there. Tank size, material, number of compartments, depth to the lid, distance and bearing off a corner of the house that isn’t going anywhere. Next time it’s a forty-minute call instead of an afternoon of hunting, whether you call us or somebody else.
A standard 1,000–1,250 gallon tank runs $300–$500 to pump. Where an old system costs more is the getting-to-it — an unlocated tank, a lid buried under eighteen inches of fill and forty years of pine duff, a second compartment nobody knew about. We tell you what the digging adds before we start it, not on the invoice.
Almost certainly not. New Hampshire only began requiring approved designs in 1967, and the records from the first few years after that mostly cover systems near surface water — everything through 1986 is paper. An empty search on a 1930s camp is the expected result, not a red flag. Where it does start to matter is if you go to add a bedroom or convert the place to year-round use, because then somebody has to establish what’s actually down there. Better to find that out on a calm Tuesday than in the middle of a project.
Usually yes, and we’ll tell you straight what you’ve got when it’s open. A cesspool is a pit that lets sewage seep out the sides — no tank, no field, no treatment to speak of. Pumping it buys time and it doesn’t make it a septic system. We’re not going to lean on you to replace it that afternoon. We’ll say what it is, roughly what it would take to put in a proper system, and let you plan around it.
No. We run a transmitter down the line from the house and follow it, and between that and probing we find it the large majority of the time on the first visit. Old plans, if the state has one, help. So does anything you remember — where the last truck parked, where the snow melts first, where the grass burns brown in a dry spell. Once it’s found we mark it permanently so this is the last time anyone asks.
On a buried tank, yes, and it usually pays for itself in two visits. A riser brings the lid to grade so there’s no excavation next time and no charge for it. The other argument is safety — an old wooden or thin concrete cover under a foot of soil is a real hazard around kids and equipment, and we’ve seen a couple in this town we wouldn’t have stood on.
Depends on the tank and how hard those weeks get used, which is why we measure sludge instead of guessing. A modest camp with a 1,000 gallon tank and two people might genuinely stretch four or five years. The same tank with the whole family in it every weekend all summer is a two or three year tank. We’ll give you a number off your own system and, if it’s longer than you expected, we’ll tell you that too.
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