When the opportunity came to volunteer his help to help sick children, Chris Stevens took it.

Stevens owns Stevens Septic Service Inc., of Monroe, North Carolina. Newton Custom Homes invited Stevens to join in its annual charity project to build a house. The homes are raffled off with $100 tickets, and proceeds benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

“He asked me if I’d like to be a part of it, and I told him, ‘Sure, I’d love to,’” Stevens says. He does work for the builder, he adds.

The house is 2,800 square feet and is located in Monroe, part of the metropolitan area around Charlotte. It has four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms. Local television station WBTV-3 provided coverage of the process.

The house required a new septic system, and the property wasn’t septic-friendly.

ADVANCED TREATMENT

Wastewater leaves the house in a 4-inch Schedule 40 PVC pipe that runs 10 feet to the first tank. It’s a 1,000-gallon two-chamber concrete model from Shoaf Precast Inc. of Lexington, North Carolina. This tank settles solids and provides initial treatment.

Wastewater next flows about 4 feet into a Norweco Singulair with one of its Hydro-Kinetic Bio-Film Reactors. This is a 800-gallon Bio-Film Reactor using attached-growth media.

Another 4-foot run of pipe takes water through an AT1500 UV treatment system, also from Norweco. Four feet more takes effluent into the pump tank, another 1,000-gallon concrete model from Shoaf. This contains a Norweco-supplied high-head turbine pump.

Water is pushed about 30 feet through 1 1/2-inch pipe to the dripfield. It contains 2,400 linear feet of Geoflow tubing buried 6 inches deep over an area of about 50 by 100 feet. An indexing valve splits the flow between the two zones of the dripfield.

A 1-inch return line picks up any effluent not pushed into the drip tubing and drops it into the pretreatment stage.

To do this job, Stevens used a Kubota KX40 compact excavator with a hammer, a John Deere 85G mini-excavator and a John Deere 325 tracked skid-steer.

BROWN ROCK

“The soils were shallow to rock,” Stevens says. That was the reason for the system that was eventually chosen. “We spent a week digging the tank holes because it was so rocky.”

Soils in his area are more than just clay. “Once you get down to a point, the clay turns into a brown rock,” Stevens says. It’s not exactly rock, he explains, but it’s harder than lumps of clay in a garden that you can crumble with your hands.

All the digging required trucks, Stevens says. Norwood Trucking & Grading of Waxhaw, North Carolina, hauled away about 16 loads of rock dirt that came out of the holes, then brought in about six loads of fill. “They didn’t charge a dime,” he adds.

In addition to Larry Thompson, professional engineer Larry Groves was also involved to supply an engineered-option permit. The EOP is a process created in 2016 to speed up approvals of onsite systems.

A licensed soil scientist and a professional engineer can design a system and submit the plan to local health officials. Those local officials have 15 days to review the permit application, and if they agree it is complete, they issue a permit. “Some counties are eight to 12 weeks out on issuing a permit. If you go engineered option, you might get it quicker than that,” Stevens says.

With an EOP, the liability for the system falls back on the soil scientist and engineer who designed it, he adds.

It wasn’t only Newton Custom Homes that donated to the project. Local news station WBTV-3 reported that more than 75 volunteers showed up in February 2023 to start building the home. 

“I know St. Jude, and I know what they do for kids and families, and it was worth every penny,” Stevens says.