Elkhart Septic Freeze Diagnosis

Telling a frozen line from a pump problem

A gravity system and a pumped system fail differently, so the first question is whether yours has a pump. If it does, and the pump seems to run without sending anything to the treatment area, we open the tank and start there. If there's no pump, we work from the house toward the tank. We get to the pipe through the cleanout and go from there. Either way, we want to know which pipe has the ice before we start thawing, because the fix differs.

What we check at the pump

We inspect the pump floats and confirm the pump actually moves effluent and switches on and off when it should. A stuck float can leave a pump running or never starting, and neither looks like a frozen pipe until you look in the tank. On a pumped line to the treatment area, we also check whether effluent drains back through the weep hole and whether the check valve stops drainback. A check valve that doesn't hold lets effluent run back toward the tank after every cycle. A bad valve or stuck float gets flagged before any thawing starts, since melting the ice without repairing it brings the same backup back within a week.

Wet ground around the system

Parts of Elkhart County have poorly drained soil, with seasonal high water close to the surface in a normal year. That affects the job when we have to get to the pump line or the drain field. The ground there can be soft or wet, so we look at it before deciding where to set up and dig. Rain totals about 39 inches a year, and May brings the most, around 4.2 inches, so spring digging near the field often means working in saturated ground. If a repair means digging, we plan around that wet ground and don't promise a day before we've seen the site.

What to expect on price

What you pay depends on where the freeze sits and whether the pump floats or the check valve need work. If the tank shows a different problem than the symptoms pointed to, you hear about it before we do anything more.