Earth sheltered homes built on a gently sloping hillside

[Old and In the Way]

11. RE: sewer pipe

When I built the house it was coming on into December here in Maine and I was starting to take shortcuts in getting things finished. When we opened up the hole in the wall for the sewer pipe it was larger than it should have been and I did a half-assed job of sealing it at that time...I wanted to get the dirt in the hole as things were starting to freeze. The next spring, when the ground started to thaw, water started leaking in around the joint...no amount of oakum could get the leak completely plugged. I lived with that for a couple of years until I finally decided to redig the pipe entrance and concrete patch/seal from the outside.

Since you are putting bathroom(s) in the basement, I assume you'd put the sewer pipe directly through the floor and gravity feed to your holding tank/leachbed? In my prior home (an old rambling farmhouse), we had everything being pushed uphill approx 150' away and 10' above the exit point. That meant pumps to push the septic water out of the holding tank up to the leech bed. That was a miserable situation....I replaced the original pump (in the holding tank) twice - once with the same model and that burned out 3 years later- I realized then it was undersized for the job, then with another with 2x the original rated HP . We had had horrible times with plug-ups etc. When we built the new house (we lost the old farmhouse in a catastrophic fire), we made sure that everything related to the sewer was designed to go as nature demanded - downhill.