Think about this from the homeowner's point of view: An addendum to yesterday's post

I am adding this to yesterday's post because I don't want an important point to be lost inside one of my usual rants.

The homeowners having the septic system installed saved $10,000 because they questioned their engineers work and decided to install an Eliminite denitrification system rather than one from the "Big Guys."

This is significant because the total installed cost of the entire system (Building sewer, primary tank, Eliminite treatment unit, drainfield, pumps, control panel and labor) was about $21,000.  This is a huge savings.  

The two systems, Eliminite and "Big Guys", are regulatory equivalents meaning in the eyes of DEQ they are equal.  However, I have years of data comparing the effluent from the two systems showing Eliminite has far superior nitrogen removal results.

So why is the other system so expensive?  My opinion is that they have, with the assistance of your state and local health department, enjoyed a near monopoly. 

In Maryland, the agency charged with permitting these system actually lowered the standard to accommodate a system that they had previously approved but could not meet the original standard for which it was permitted.

Generally, these systems are approved for installation by providing ONE data point, NSF testing.  The problem is once the system has passed NSF's fantasy test, the state agencies don't bother exploring REAL WORD numbers from the installed systems and it is a well know fact, though only spoken in dark corners of empty rooms, that certified systems generally do not meet real world nitrogen standards.  Hence the shenanigans in Maryland.  (The certification is pricey...it would cost a company in the neighborhood of $150,000 to complete the 6 month test.   Who pays for this?  You do.) 

In Rhode Island it is reported that residential denitrification systems cost $35,000 to $45,000. http://www.thewesterlysun.com/news/shoreline-building-hurt-by-dem-rule/article_227ed8b8-0955-11e1-9058-001cc4c03286.html

Here is a breakdown of the types of systems installed in Charlstown, RI taken from:  http://www.charlestownri.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC=%7B57BE787A-1F23-406A-906B-4FBC5BCACF34%7D&DE=%7BA376CA24-20CF-48FA-B83B-5FC3F0F62459%7D

Monopoly?   You decide.  I can tell you that based on the pie chart, Eliminite would provide dramatically lower effluent nitrogen numbers than the vast majority (90%+) of the systems being installed (I can't speak to every system listed because I am surprised anyone even uses them any more) and cost thousands less. 

This means that Rhode Island would see an immediate reduction in the cost of residential denitrification systems of about....you guessed it $10,000 to $25,000. 

That is real money in the homeowners pocket and less nitrogen in the environment. 

Oh..and for the record, Montana's water is better.

A letter from the Client to the Engineer. File this under, "I told you so."

A little background:
Client hires Mr. Engineer to design an advanced onsite wastewater treatment system for her property.  The system will serve three homes.

Mr. Engineer decides that he will not show Eliminite on the plans and opts to only show the "Big Guys" onsite wastewater system on the plans. 

During the process of obtaining cost proposals for the treatment system, several contractors suggest  Client look into Eliminite as an option because they prefer Eliminite advanced onsite treatment systems to those manufactured by the "Big Guys."

Eliminite provided a  price to  Clients contractor and offers to help have the system re-permitted if Client decides to work with us. 

Client decides to use Eliminite and authorizes re-permitting.  Re-permitting takes a few days.

The Smackdown
The system is installed and, apparently, Mr. Engineer, noticing the construction activity on the property asks Client if he should come out and certify the installation.  Client sends Mr. Engineer the following letter:

Mr. Engineer,

They are just finishing putting in the Eliminite system this week. In response to your inquiry, we went with this system because it was $10,000 less than the other system. They are a Montana company & have been very professional with us. They should be included in the options you give people also.

Thanks,

Mrs. Client

That's a fairly strong rebuke and I doubt Client will be recommending Mr. Engineer for future work.

The Problem
In general, larger firms prefer to specify systems that cost more because their fees are based on a percentage of the overall cost. So a system that costs $10,000 more, represents an additional $2000 to $2500 in the engineers pocket for doing nothing.

Clients, whether public or private, must be aware of this practice of deliberately designing with more expensive components for no reason other than that they cost more.  A case in point is a Montana firm that is designing a public onsite wastewater treatment system and is only designing with the "Big Guys" on their plans.  They refuse to even call us back even though they have already been smacked down by other clients that they pulled these shenanigans with.  

The bottom line is, because we are able to provide better systems for less money, they make less.  In fact, the installed cost of one of our systems was less than the cost of their engineering services, and they did not even design the system.

This firm just lost a big public job that they did the preliminary engineering report for.  The clients decided not to use them on the design and construction phases.  The firm that won the award is a competent, ethical group that has worked with Eliminite on several projects.  Their approach is to allow several manufacturers to present a design for review and the best system wins the job.

Eliminite almost always wins the fair bids.  The only ones we do not win, are the ones that are rigged from the beginning.   This ultimately ends up costing the client a lot more money initially, more money for operation and maintenance and, after the "Big Guys" system has been installed and is not meeting permit requirements, more money because the engineers are forced to "de-certify" the non-compliant system.

Want to know more?  Give me a call.

Ten Days in October

This project has a long history so I'll provide a short background.  It was built in the 90's as a mixed use residential and commercial development in a resort area. It consists of cabins, condos, retail and a restaurant. 

Back in those days recirculating sand filters were all rage and the DEQ required one to be installed for wastewater treatment. 

You remember the design...a goofy little frame wall built around the perimeter of the excavation to which plywood or drywall was applied so that a 30 mil PVC liner could be draped over the whole thing.  Then there were the layers of sand, gravel, pea gravel, more gravel that had to be meticulously placed, leveled and smoothed.  

Well it failed, just like they all fail.  It was rebuilt.  The new one failed.

When the owners decided they had had enough, they installed an Eliminite as a retro-fit to the existing primary and recirculation tanks. 

The photo on the left shows the wastewater in the recirculation tank before startup.  It looks so bad you can almost smell it through the screen. 

The photo on the right shows a sample collected from the Eliminite just ten days after the system was started.   It is clear and there is no offensive odor. 

This means that in ten days or less the Eliminite system turned a tank full of filthy, stinky, nasty wastewater,  into a clear, odor-free effluent.   

Try this with one of those air bubbler systems and the aeration tank would have looked like  Yellowstone Mud Pot.  I can only imagine what a filter fabric or foam cube system would look like after a week of receiving this type of wastewater.  Can you say, "Time for the Tyvek suit?"

Wastewater sampling

Justin Buchanan and I went on a maintenance run recently and inspected 7 Eliminite systems in about 2 hours.  The reason we can do so many inspections in such a short time is because there is usually nothing for us to do other than collect a sample and look at the system.  We read the counter numbers from the panel, open the lids, inspect the MetaRocks, pull a sample, do a quick flush on the drainfield and move to the next system.  I cannot imagine arriving at the site and needing to remove feculent, septic saturated sheets to hose off or having to travel with a foam cube fluffer to loosen up saturated little foam meatballs. 

Every system we inspected was producing wastewater that looked like the sample shown in the picture.  Clear, odor-free and well below Montana's nitrogen limit of 24 mg/L.

I spoke with a government relations coordinator (Lobbyist) who works for a big manufacturer of onsite systems.  Apparently, this company was very interested in the New Mexico study in which we participated.  Our average total nitrogen for the duration of the study was about 7 mg/L.  The PhD lobbyist took a stab at explaining the fundamentals of biological nitrification and denitrification to me because, in his experience, onsite systems cannot achieve such stellar numbers.    He reasoned that our impressive results were probably due to "one little old lady wearing Depends," living in the house.  He actually said that!  I tried to explain to him that the people living in the home work from home and conduct business in their home.  The installer informed me that Eliminite was chosen for that home because the people entertain regularly and he felt other systems would not be able to treat the flow from the house. 

I have to admit his comment took me by surprise and it seems offensive of several levels.  But, I guess it explains why, in his experience, onsite systems cannot acheive impressive numbers.  In fact, it seems obvious that, considering his comment, their systems never produce results comparable to Eliminite, unless the system is not being used, of course.

Maybe the next set of requirements this company will include in their warranty, after the prohibition on using house-hold cleaners and antibacterial soap, will be that everyone in the residence needs to wear Depends undergarments when they are home.  That might help their numbers but can you imagine the new inspection procedures?

The Last Blog Post is Creating Quite a Commotion

The previous post on highway rest areas sure has generated a lot of interest.  I have experimented with my posts and find that educational posts such as:

http://eliminite.blogspot.com/2011_06_01_archive.html

Just don't generate as much interest as my slightly more sarcastic posts:

http://eliminite.blogspot.com/2009/10/aerobic-treatment-units-atu.html

And the recent post on highway rest areas has really brought the little critters out of the wood work.  Keep in mind that the information I post is all readily available to the public, you might have to dig a little but it's there.

Case in point,  I was poking around and came across a newspaper story about a tiny town in New Mexico.  Some genius decided there were wastewater problems and the town was required to build a new wastewater treatment system.  It is comprised of several clustered treatment systems scattered around the town. 

The article was very interesting and recently I visited this small town and looked at what had been installed.   I took photos and drove around, visiting each little cluster system.

Now, maybe I'm no expert but I know stink when I smell it, and these things were stinky. This is really too bad because it would not be too much of a stretch to assume that the system cost was pretty close to the entire value of the property it served.  In other words, if you took the cost of the wastewater treatment system, in cash, you could probably buy all the property the system was designed to serve.  Now this might be a bit of an exaggeration, but if you saw the place, you might agree with me. 

My understanding from the newspaper article is that the system was not meeting its discharge limits and everybody involved was pulling their hair out about it.  The town had the engineer there, the distributor, the manufacturer, and they simply could not get it/them into compliance. 

The interesting thing in the article was that the manufacturer was blaming the installer, the operator, the town, anyone they could name in an attempt to shift responsibility somewhere other than where it rightfully belonged...right in the manufacturers lap. 

Ultimately I heard that they pretty much stopped sampling it so nobody really knows what's going on, but it sounds like it/they are still non-compliant.

I was happy to pull into the RV park in New Mexico that is being served with an Eliminite and see every space full and utilizing the treatment system to its capacity.  I opened the lids, no odor.  The owner said there is never any odor.  The treated RV wastewater was clear, and odor free and the BOD5 had recently been reported at 18.9 mg/L and Total Nitrogen was 13.7 mg/L.

I was just visiting and was not called there to fix something that was broken.  There was no conflict and the owner was so happy with the system that he let Amanda and me, and our three pets, stay in one of his resort cabins at a reduced rate.  This is a big difference with Eliminite compared to other systems, we care about our products and, as a result, the systems work.

Highway Rest Area Here are the Results

A few days ago I posted the photo below of a wastewater sample taken from one of our highway rest area on site wastewater treatment systems.  The lab sent me the sample results.

cBOD: 4.0 mg/L

Ammonia: 2.4 mg/L
TSS: Not Detected
E. coli: Not Detected
Nitrate +Nitrite: 31.8 mg/
Organic Nitrogen:  20.9 mg/L

The system is set up to add carbon and alkalinity but these results are from one of our standard systems with no carbon addition and no alkalinity addition.  Influent strength at these rest areas is
BOD ~1200 mg/L
Nitrogen~450 mg/l

This means a standard eliminite system, treating very high strength wastewater, is achieving about 85% removal of nitrogen and about a 97% removal of BOD.   The permit for this system requires 60% removal of nitrogen.   Because the system is so far below permit limits, the Department of Transportation may not need to add the carbon source.  If the carbon source were to be added, it would take about 3 hours to have everything set up and dialed in.  I am obviously not using wood chips for denitrification because if I were, we would have to have excavators out to the jobsite to install the wood chip tanks, and plumbers to connect the piping.  Sorry guys, I just think wood chips are a bad idea considering that many Eliminite systems, in standard configuration, already produce Total Nitrogen results in single digits for a lot less money.

So for a system operating in a remote location on an Interstate highway experiencing no malfunctions or alarms, it is doing pretty well.  It has not required any maintenance time other than sample collection.


I was at a similar highway rest area in Colorado that had another manufacturers system for wastewater treatment.  It discharges directly into the River.  I learned that the system does not always meet a 50 mg/L ammonia standard and routinely exceeds this generous standard resulting in the discharge of  wastewater directly into the River.  I feel sorry for the rafters and Kayakers!!  You all better watch out for the "Brown" trout.

I understand the Colorado system has been out of compliance for a long time.  The manufacturer has been out there with the engineer and distributor and nobody can seem to get the thing into compliance (Not even the people who designed, built and installed it) I know of one sample set where the total nitrogen was over 150 mg/L.  The Colorado DOT would apparently rather ignore the system than get it fixed ,even though it continues to pollute the River. (Maybe, because it continues to pollute the  River) This must be the benefit to a company that employs full time lobbyists in an effort to have its way with state and local regulations. 

What it really is, is further evidence that pod type systems simply cannot match the treatment results of Eliminite Advanced On Site Wastewater Treatment Systems.  

Oh...and,  "Eliminite is Lobbyist Free Since '93!"

This is what Eliminite does to wastewater from a highway rest area...

The onsite system was installed in the winter at high elevation.  In its 10 months of operation there have been no alarms, no malfunctions and no maintenance.  We have inspected the system visually but have not had to do anything to it.

We were awarded this job through a competitive bidding process and our price was about $30,000 lower than the "Big Guys" price and they did not even include denitrification.  That means we were probably  $60,000 to $80,000 less than the "Big Guys."

Every Eliminite system is this reliable.