Trades & Labor Rock/Boulder removal?

What a brilliant suggestion but I do have a problem with this, building a house here as the man seems to be doing? will require upwards of say 250 x 40kg bags of cement usually blended cements contain around 20% ash, so all you need now is 200 x 40kg bags of cement and the ash from around 1000 bonfires should make up the other 50kg, your local fires are all from burning wood, wood ash weighs nothing and you may be lucky to get 50grms per fire, brilliant and well thought out idea

 

That is 2000kg of ash to find and so 40,000 fires to raid. We have discussed aging recently mon ami so it is either me or you.

 

ah ok boss nice, so now you decide to introduce quantities, and belittle my suggestion, so now in the words of americans, who is being the dumb @ss, where did he state he was going to build house????.....can you quote me the extract, he mentioned a sceptic tank.........where did he mention a house.......and a 1000 bonfires............its ok to show your age, but not your ignorance

 

Is a sceptic tank one that just thinks it's full of shite?

 

I think it is fairly obvious that if you are providing a Septic tank, it is highly likely it will not be for living in as it will be full of shite, normally a tank is provided to service the waste from a building, so I perhaps wrongly assumed there would be a building to follow, I guess that was kind of dumb of me to assume such nonsense?

However to build any tank of a reasonable size will require around 8 to 10 bags of cement and at the ratio of 20% ash to cement that is still a lot of fires to collect the ash from and still a pretty dumb idea?

You can actually buy this all premixed for you these Hardware stores have so much of it they are willing to sell it and it is less expensive that the pure Portland.

 

I have to say that even though people will sometimes disagree with @DAVE1952 (as they will with anyone who posts on the Forum as, interestingly, we are all individuals and think differently!) I have found his information on building here very illuminating. I have had my eyes opened to the pitfalls and they are greater than I ever thought and have been pointed into certain directions I had not considered. So I am very pleased to have his input.

 

Noted the Santillian, not much more is Gordon's backhoe, comes with a jackhammer. We are leaving quite a few of the boulders unless they directly block a foundation, make them part of the landscape. Shifted the septic a meter to avoid the really biggies...

 

Since I posted here some info on Septic tanks, I have been talking to a friend who was telling me his Tank collapsed and that was due to lack of Rebar inside the CHB, this had been built some 10/12yrs ago. Having given this some thought it has made me realise that it is not good to build any tank in CHB, the problem being although they are rendered on the inside very few if any are rendered outside, so the rebar is subject to constant wet conditions from the outside as CHB is quite porous, perhaps that had added to my friends problem not only did he lack enough rebar likely what was there was rotting anyway after 10yrs?

I have seen many underground chambers built in UK, these were used to install telephone cables, the contractors had a very simple method they would dig a hole with clean cut sides slightly larger that the required size of the chamber and then line it with Polythene, throw some concrete in the bottom then lower a reinforcement cage on to that, once in place they would add more concrete to form the base, after that was set they would drop in some wooden formwork, the nice clean cut earth covered with poly would form the outside of the chamber walls and the wood form gave a clean finish to the inside, many of these had to be made on busy roads and they needed the quickest method possible to get the road open again after one week.

This can be a great method for building a septic tank, cast in place concrete the steel inside the concrete would be well protected from both water and inside waste and outside water also, it just may be slightly more expensive but it is 10 times stronger and likely to last 10 times longer, also this requires no rendering at all, so that is a saving of time.

 

One other thing I forgot to mention the access covers on a septic are better sealed with some weak cement or tile grout (something that is easily broken later on) much water can pass through the covers and fill the tank, also better to have a slight run on the top to shed the rain water off.

I have heard of a few people needing regular cleanouts of their tanks due to then filling quite quickly, likely they have bad fitting covers or they have been mixed up when removed before?