Running a Gite in Brittany

Within a few minutes the digger man had excavated a fairly sizeable hole to take the septic tank. It's been dug around the back of the two new gites as close to the main sewage outlet as possible.

The grey soil pipe in the photo is the main 'effluent supply' from all the toilets, baths, kitchens etc. in both gites.

I popped upstairs into the gites to carry on wiring up the electrics for about 10 minutes and when I came down the tank had been buried and it still wasn't even lunchtime. They do get a shift on.

The green bits you can see are inspection hatches to check inside the septic tank.

Before getting the septic tank installed we had to have a soil study done to check that waste water soaks away properly and does not contaminate any wells or ground water. There are a whole raft of regulations around septic tanks. In our case the soil had too much clay for a standard soakaway and we needed a large gravel and sand filtration bed (bac a sable).

That's me standing in the hole for the bac a sable. It's 8 meters by 6 meters by nearly 2 meters deep.

The 'sand pit', looking like a temporary swimming pool, is lined with a huge plastic sheet and drainage tubes placed in the bottom to collect the water once it's filtered down through the sand etc. above. You can just see the slits in the tubes to collect the water.

In the far left corner of the photo the water runs out of the bottom of the pit and into a drainage channel adjacent to our boundary. Apparently once it's been processed the water comes out clear and drinkable!

Several lorry loads of gravel and sand came and went during the day.

They have churned up the courtyard a fair bit. Looks like I'm going to need a few lorry loads of gravel to freshen up the drive once all the plant has left.

I missed the operation but I believe that a layer of gravel was placed over the bottom pipes then a porous membrane laid before filling with sand.

The membrane looked very similar to the sort used by gardeners to suppress weeds but let the water soak through. I assume it stop the sand washing out the bottom of the pit.

Once filled with sand the supply pipes were laid on the surface. These pipes are fed with the 'digested' grey water from the fosse septique.

The small slits in the pipes are facing downwards this time. You can also just see a small concrete inspection hatch at the far end. Looking down it you can see the bottom connection point of the drainage tubes.

Finally the input supply pipes are covered with gravel and then topped off with another membrane. I suppose to stop the top layer of mud seeping into the soakaway and clogging everything up.

Once the inspector has called to verify everything is OK the bac a sable will be covered over with the final layer of topsoil and a certificate of conformity issued.