Locating Septic Tanks the Old-Fashioned Way

When Ray Harrison goes out on a job, odds are he’ll pull a long steel rod off his truck at some point. “That’s pretty much something we use on a daily basis,” he says. “It’s kind of old school. A lot of people switched to cameras.” He runs Raymond Harrison Septic Services in Chestertown, Maryland, on the eastern side of Chesapeake Bay, and the tool he values most is his sounding rod. Push the sounding bar into the ground, he says, and you can locate a septic tank. You can distinguish a concrete tank from a plastic tank.