Field testing of absorption bed clogging

On-site wastewater treatment systems throughout North America most commonly use absorption beds to re-introduce treated wastewater from rural properties into the groundwater. With proper design and operating conditions these systems can work well for over 20 years with some reports of over 40 years. However, failure rates as high as 30% for on-site systems are reported and the most common mode of failure is the clogging of the soil absorption system. Research under laboratory settings has been conducted in a number of institutions to demonstrate the key factors leading to failure. These include items such as poor design, excessive hydraulic loading, and high concentrations of wastewater constituents leading to the formation of an excessive biologic layer (the biomat) at the interface of the sand and gravel. Most of these studies have been on simplified systems under accelerated conditions leading to questions about the validity of the results for actual systems. This project was designed to determine the causes of clogging using actual systems so that questions about the effects of simplified testing could be avoided. In this study actual soil absorption systems with ages from 3 to 15 years were studied to determine the proportion of the bed that was 'failed'. Failure was defined as the portion of the bed which had a significant biomat present and ponding water. Measurements were made of the effluent rates, effluent quality, absorption bed characteristics and background soil conditions. The results confirmed the effect of background soils in that fine grain soils showed a much stronger tendency for biomat formation and reached failure sooner. What was of greatest importance was the effect of the wastewater constituents, most particularly BOD, on the expected bed life. With the exception of soil characteristics, BOD had greatest impact on the rate of failure. For normal operating conditions even a modest change in BOD, within the range of expected values, resulted in significant changes in expected bed life, at times reducing the expected bed life to less than 10 years. What this highlights is that while most codes recognize the importance of hydraulic loading and background soil types in their design approaches, failure to explicitly include or pay attention to wastewater strength may lead to grossly under designed systems. (author)