Now is the time, the plumber said,
To speak of many things,
Of nipples, valves and flanges,
Of caps and sealant rings.
Though strictly speaking, none of those we asked to supply our needs were plumbers. Nor did any of the above items help to solve our problem.
Which was….
Rewind.
I’ll remind you once again that we are off the map in terms of the utilities. This means we are connected neither to mains water, nor to mains sewage disposal. Instead we provide our own.
To zap the sewage, when we first moved in we had a two-chamber septic tank/ sludge separator.
The waste was filtered through two compartments which allowed the sludge to fall to the bottom and then for the water to drain off and be filtered through the ground into the water table. For most of the time, it ran itself, only requiring the sludge to be pumped out into a tanker twice a year and carted off.
This worked well. Little maintenance was needed, and having no electric pump, it was not dependent on our vulnerable electricity supply. What’s more it was very economical, for all of the above reasons. And even if the tank was close to our house and our well, there were never any harmful bacteria or chemicals in our drinking water. For better or for worse, we are still alive and well.
You would have thought this was a model environmentally-friendly solution. And in our pastoral naivety that is what we thought too. But we hadn’t reckoned with the spin governments put on ecological policies. That they should benefit the economy as well as (or more than) the environment.
So it came to pass that about 10 years ago, we were informed by the local council that there were new regulations. This meant that a two-chamber set-up was no longer acceptable and a different system would have to be installed. We had 18 months to do this or we would face a fine.
When we asked for a reason, we were told that phosphates were leaking into the groundwater, chiefly from washing powders. Needless to say, they hadn’t measured the contamination of the concerned water tables. The closest to this being done happened when we had had our drinking water analysed and found no trace of phosphates (or anything else that was likely to disturb our surroundings or stomachs). In any case, if we chose to become luminescent after dark, then surely that was our own delightful prerogative.
Whatever….
Now the government could, of course, have banned the use of phosphates in washing powders and thus solved the problems at source. But that would have meant taking on powerful multinationals and presumably putting a slight dent into the national economy. The general public, especially the minority that live in the countryside, by comparison don’t constitute a lobby group of any great influence. For a start, there are not, relatively speaking, that many of us. Nor do any of the larger political parties rely on our votes. And the same applies to the argument that clear-cut harvesting (that is, using Transformer-like machines to absolutely flatten a forest) leaches much more harmful chemicals (caesium, arsenic and old lace) into the subsoil. Forestry is big business here, and big businesses come with powerful lobbies.
So, as I said, whatever….
Our first reaction was to ask the council for advice. Since they had issued the directive, they were presumably better-informed on the issue than we were. They told us they could not offer any kind of advice since this would be ‘jävig’, that is they were ‘judicially disqualified’, since any offer of help might be considered partisan and thus corrupt. I suspect, in fact, they had as little clue as we did. And in the wake of the council’s decision, a number of contractors had sprung up in the area, but they were guaranteed to be partisans, if not out-and-out cowboys.
So we asked my wife’s relatives, who are for the most part, extremely handy and well-informed on matters technical. By coincidence, my brother-in-law, who displays all of the above qualifications in spades, was an agent for a company that manufactured a biomodule filtration system that would work with the minimal depth of topsoil over the bedrock that we have and which would not take up the acres of ground that we don’t have. That was the theory, at least. Thus it came to pass that bro- and pa- in-laws trailed all the way up from the Deep South with the equipment, duly dug up the garden and installed the new septic system. Since even the minimal surface area required was greater than that available where we had our present septic tank, the underfloor piping had to be switched around so that waste-water and sewage exited on the other side of the house. This I happily left to my father-in-law. Even though he is about ten years older than me, he can be trusted with everything that isn’t covered by the term ‘idiotproof’.
In a relatively short period of time, the system was up and ready to run. All we needed before we plugged it in was the approval of the council inspectors. They came, they tested the soil and they approved. We heaved a sigh of relief and happily shelled out the £5000 that it all cost. Sort of happily, that is. As in we didn’t shed tears. Much.
On the other hand, we positively moulted them when we found after a couple of months that our lawn and drive had been reduced to a stinking quagmire. Meanwhile we had been plagued by constant stoppages in the new piping set-up, since there was not sufficient gravity-fall for the drainage to that side of the house. Clearly this was not going to pass any further so-called inspections. In any case, our property had become a no-go zone for visitors and a nightmare for the residents.
We had to think again. And quickly. Before our olfactory systems became totally desensitised.
Luckily by now, more and more reputable companies had opened in the area. We settled on a local company that produced and installed aerobic treatment units. These, it turns out, don’t work by filtration. Rather they oxygenate the waste-water with air pumps and neutralise noxious chemicals with, you’ve guessed it, other noxious chemicals. This system requires less land and less topsoil. But it needs to be installed close to an area where the processed water can drain off. Often this means drainage trenches have to be dug. But we have a stream that runs by our house. Don’t ask me why. But it was perfectly OK to allow drain-off directly into the stream. As long as the drain-off was downstream of you drinking water well. Why? Because presumably the waste-water did nothing to neutralise the bacteria in the sewage. So if we develop e-coli, salmonella, typhoid, cholera, dysentery or polio, the cattle down the line are going to start dropping like flies.
Still, it was obviously not our place to apply normal human logic to a situation that was growing increasingly reminiscent of a Kafka novel. Our other lawn was dug up, the ‘refinery’ was installed, the piping was switched back, we forked out another £10,000 (yes, ten thousand quid) and the inspectors smiled.
The advantage of this system was that it worked. The disadvantages were that it was expensive to install and more costly to run. Not only did it quire electricity for the pumps. We also need to purchase regular supplies of the witches’ brew that takes out the phosphates. Oh, and the sludge still needs to be pumped out at regular intervals.
By now, I had washed my hands of the whole business. This is called ‘an elegant metaphor’, by the way. I leave my wife to handle the maintenance of the system. It is far too Swedish for me, so I limit myself to cutting the grass around the tank.
Oh well, we thought. (Another elegant metaphor, I’m sure you’ll agree.) At least it works, we thought. But note the use of the past tense there. Last winter struck early and fiercely. It was the second coldest winter we’ve had since we moved here, with temps falling to -25°C. So the pipes under the house didn’t get blocked. But the drainage pipe to the stream did. It got frozen solid. No doubt this came back to the shallowness of the topsoil once again. (So Jesus was wrong? We built our house on rock, after all.) So the pipe was too close to the surface.
Matthias, our friendly installation man, professed himself baffled, but duly cut away the frozen part of the pipe. He was markedly less friendly when the remaining pipe froze and he had to dig through equally frozen earth to sever another portion. By now, the waste water was a good few metres way from the stream.
So, one further elegance, this time of irony. We have paid fifteen thousand quid to have our waste-water filtered through the ground the ground once again. Until the inspectors get wind of our game, that is.
The final rubbing of salt into the wound came even more recently, however. While on sewage exile in Thailand over the latter months of winter, the wife alerted me to an article sent into the Swedish paper we subscribe to (online these days, of course). The writer pointed out, amongst other things, that Sweden’s councils had exceeded their brief by several light years in outlawing all septic tanks and demanding they be replaced by something much more costly (and non-sustainable).
The source of the ruling was a governmental code that came into force in 1998, which regarded such systems as potential threats to the environment, even though larger households than our duplex can hardly generate a sufficient amount of phosphorus waste to constitute a danger. Needless to say, Sweden’s councils presented no evidence to support the claim. The same applies to the burden of proof in individual cases. According to the relevant legal rulings on the subject, the onus lies with the councils to prove that a sewage system constitutes a danger to the environment before they can demand its replacement. Yet the councils, no doubt for financial reasons, have ignored these rulings and continued to fine for non-compliance. What’s more, it turns out we had a right to appeal against the council’s decision. This was never pointed out to us – at the time, or even later.
So to sum it all up, we have been conned out of somewhere in the region of £15,000 by an over-mighty authority. The knowledge didn’t exactly ruin our holiday, but it did little to improve it. In the meantime, many less blessed with spare funds than ourselves have been forced to sell up and move out, simply because they couldn’t afford to install an expensive new system.
Well corblimeystripemepink! I think I hear you say. Which is the more delicate equivalent of what I have exclaimed to myself and others on a number of occasions.
Which leaves only water to deal with in this survey of Swedish rural angst.
The staff of life. Or is that bread, perhaps? Who cares? Try living without water for a week and see where that gets you.
As I mentioned, we have our own well. Not that we have a choice about it. We couldn’t have piped water from of the council, even if we were prepared to pay them for it. We’re not alone in this. No-one outside the couple of small towns in the area has piped water.
The upside of this situation is that we’re poisoned with neither chlorine nor fluoride. Instead we have naturally filtered rainwater. And very nice it is too. Most of the time. Admittedly, it can taste a little weird when a water vole, driven to despair by the havoc wreaked to her environment by climate change, chooses to drown herself and her brood in our drinking water. And occasionally the amount of manganese and iron can cause discoloration to glasses, porcelain and presumably, to our guts. But so far, we haven’t been laid low by any bacterial gastric infections. Which is more than can be said for those with piped water. In certain parts of the country there have been recent outbreaks of e-coli due to poor maintenance of, yes, water pipes.
The major downside is once again our dependence on electricity, this time to pump the water up from the well. But since the power cables were dug down, this hasn’t been much of an issue.
Until now.
For we have recently learnt that local councils intend to inspect private drinking-water wells for contamination, according to rules that are the strictest in the EU. As yet, I have learnt no grounds for this. If we want to poison ourselves, I would have thought that was our own business. In any case, if they are looking for harmful chemicals like arsenic and caesium, they might usefully refer to those that probably put them there in the first place – the aforementioned forest-owners that choose to clear-cut harvest their wood, thus churning up these substances and leaching them into the groundwater.
Given the historical precedent, this is unlikely to happen. It’s more probable that any contamination will be attributed to our sewage system. At which time we will, in all likelihood, decide to relocate to Costa Rica.
Watch this space. It will shortly self-combust.
Reference (and thanks to) – Roland Ekstrand, CEO of Svensk Klimatcertifiering, for his article in Dagens Nyheter, ‘Sluta underkänna fungerande avloppsanläggningar’ (‘Stop declaring functioning septic tanks illegal’), DN 4th February 2024
Letters from Sweden 