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Hello and welcome to Make It Clear, a conversational podcast about all things related to water and wastewater. I'm your host, Shawn Rapp, and in each episode, I'll be joined by new guests and co-hosts as we tackle relevant wastewater industry topics with facts and expert opinions to make things clear.
Shawn: Hello and welcome again to another episode of Make It Clear. And today we've got a really great episode for you. We're talking about chambers in the drain field and I've got two
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great guests with me today. Dennis Hallahan, is the technical director of government affairs for Infiltrator Water Technologies, and Chris Strycharz, who is the wastewater engineer and technical services person in Infiltrator Wastewater Technologies as well. So, welcome gentlemen. Thanks for joining me today.
Dennis and Chris: Thank you.
Shawn: You bet. All right. So, we want to talk about chambers, and this is something that Orenco really doesn't have a whole lot of
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experience with in our history. So this is something that you guys have really been working with for the last quite a few number of years. Chambers have actually been around since 1987 and are now the most widely installed drainfield product in North America. For those listeners who might not know anything about Chambers, can you briefly describe what they are and what you think drove the evolution for that?
Dennis: Sure. I can jump in first if, if, you like, Chris. So
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Chambers, yes, you're right, Shawn, been around since 1987 and that's what really started the company. And so in New England, there's a long history, New England, New York, New Jersey, a couple other states with what they call concrete chambers. And those were big structures you'd place in the ground as leaching structures for the drain fields. so along came a plastics engineer and said, hey, I can do that with plastic.
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And hence he developed, his name with Jim Nichols, he developed what we call the plastic chamber. so what, what they are, their open bottom structures look like maybe a half pipe, but they also have openings on the side walls to let wastewater infiltrate through the soil, through the sides of the chambers as well. It’s just a big open structure made out of plastic to go in the ground to be an option for people to use for drain field products.
Shawn: All right, awesome.
Chris: Yeah. If anyone's curious, it's,
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It's recycled polypropylene, is what they're made out of. So it's all recycled plastics.
Shawn: Oh, wonderful. Okay. So uses a resource we already have and don't have to create anything new, so to speak. That's awesome. Now the chambers themselves are basically just a surface for bacteria to grow on. Is that correct?
Dennis: Well, the chambers themselves, I like to say, as I travel the country and talk about wastewater all over the place and septic systems, I say, you know, get a good look at this chamber. This chamber
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does not treat wastewater and it does not infiltrate wastewater, the soil does. So what the chamber does, it really protects that soil interface and allows a complete open soil interface at the bottom of the system for the soil to accept the wastewater and the soil is gonna treat the wastewater.
Shawn: Oh, wonderful, okay. So scenario, you're at a trade show and somebody asks you, why should I use chambers instead of a traditional gravel system? How do you answer that question?
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Dennis: Boy, that's a great question. And we do get that quite often. And what I like to say, it really matters where you sit. In other words, are you a contractor? Are you a regulator? Are you an installer? Are you a designer engineer? so if, or are you the homeowner? So each one has different views and benefits. For example, if you're an engineer, you may love the chamber because it's completely open and it has a lot of storage
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available. So for let's say those commercial facilities with high peak flow event of facilities, it's going to accept that water readily and store it and then slowly let it infiltrate into the ground. if you're an engineer, that might be a great benefit. If you're a regulator, now regulators have a tough time regulating stone. Now stone comes with what we call fines associated with stone when they crush it and they make it. And the fines are very
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detrimental to the system performance. They fall down at the bottom of the soil interface and help to plug up that soil and counteract good things like the infiltration rate. So anyway, with a chamber product, there's zero fines, so they don't have to deal with it at all. So if you're a regulator, hey, I don't got to worry about the fines. Chris, what would you say for let's say contractors or other folks?
Chris: Yeah, I was just thinking to go back to the designer, the engineer, one of the big benefits you have, it's a reduced
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footprint. So you can shrink the footprint compared to if you were to use a conventional stone and pipe drain field. So if you're a designer, an engineer, and you're designing someone's site and you can't fit a stone and pipe drain field, Chambers give you that option to kind of shrink the footprint, typically like 25 to 30 % drain field reduction. So you can fit it into a tighter, smaller lot. So I mean, that's a huge benefit. I know a lot of people like that for that benefit. But for like a contractor or an installer,
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To me, I would, If I was a contractor, I think the biggest benefit would probably be speed of installation, just compared to, and again, we're kind of comparing it to a stone and pipe drain field. So you excavate a trench, you have to truck in all that crushed stone, you have to dump it in, you have to go back and forth to the pile, dump it in, rake it level, put your perforated pipe, fabric on top, and it's just kind of, it's labor intensive, takes a while, or chambers, I mean, you can fit a full three, four, five bedroom chamber system in the back of an
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F-150. And then you can just drop them in pretty quick So I would say that's a big benefit for a contractor installer speed and ease of installation.
Shawn: Great That's great.
Chris: Yeah, what else? You see anything else?
Dennis: No, I think we pretty much hit it You know all those things like the contractor you're right Chris is the benefit is the speed So, you know if we look up and we see a Rainstorm coming which happens in the summer all throughout the US, you know, you get the afternoon thunderstorms
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you can have this system installed and backfilled real quick and so you can protect it better. So it gets installed faster. And then, you know, time is money. So now a contractor, if he did one or two stone systems per week, he can be doing three or four chamber systems per week and, you know, making more money. you know, economics always plays in. And what I like to tell people, said, look, if chambers weren't economically the winning solution, they would not have been around now for almost 40 years.
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So it's a real basic equation there, right? It's withstood the test of time.
Shawn: That's a great benefit. Another question here. We just talked about, or you just mentioned, drain field reduction sizes. And… what's the science behind that, and why does that work?
Dennis: OK, another great question. I'll start off, Chris, and you'll fill in anything I forget about. All right, so you can imagine we had to
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put out a lot of research and science on this because you can't just show up if you're an inventor in your garage and say, okay, I'm gonna make this healthcare product, this wastewater product because it's Department of Health and we're dealing with public health. So any product that gets sold into the public health field has to be quote, approved in each state. And rightfully so. So there's been a lot of science that went on.
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Basically, we're looking at two different interfaces. If we compare it to the old stone and pipe system, if you take that stone, dig a trench or a bed, and then you have the excavator dump in that stone, what happens? We have what's called embedment, compaction, and fines, all associated with that stone. And so that interface, the interface is the soil that's going to accept that wastewater, the infiltration rate.
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All those things, the embedment, the compaction and fines are detrimental to infiltration. So if we just take away the stone and we take away the compaction, we take away the embedment of the stone into the soil and all those fines and we remove them entirely, we provide a completely open surface of soil for wastewater to infiltrate into. Then all of a sudden it just becomes a more efficient system. So when we talk about reduction in system size,
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It's really not a reduction in system size. It's just more efficient system. We can get more throughput through one square foot of area than we can if we put stone on that interface. And so there have been many studies at different universities throughout the US that have shown this. And then those studies were used to get approvals in each state. In some states, it's county by county.
Shawn: Great. I'm sure there's a lot of people would be loving to hear that. Now let's see here.
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Another question we had here, can you give us examples of some of the different ways that chambers are being used today beyond the standard gravity drain field?
Chris: Want me take this one, Dennis?
Dennis: Yes, please.
Chris: Yeah, there's all sorts of different configurations. All right, so you start off, have your two typical ways to feed a drain field. You have your gravity fed systems and your pressurized systems. So either your wastewater flows from your septic tank by gravity out to your drain field and spills in and infiltrates into the soil or
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you have a project where let's say your tank is lower in elevation than your drain field or the state code requires pressure distribution to evenly distribute it, then you have to install a pump tank and a pump and then disperse it out to the drain field. So those are kind of like the two major categories. And then within that, you can do all sorts of stuff. So you can do trenches where you do a single individual trench of chambers, row of chambers, and then you move over a certain distance. And that's going to be required by the code, say six, seven, eight feet.
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We have native soil in between and you put your next trench. So that'd be trenches. Or you could do a bed system where you excavate one large area and you throw in chambers and they're shoulder to shoulder. That's another option. We could do slope systems. So, with your drain field, you always want to keep your trench bottom level. And if you're on a slope site, you can actually step it down the hill. So the first trench is highest in elevation and you keep that individual trench level on and keep it on contour. And then the next trench has to step
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down a certain distance and then you keep that next one on level and you can keep going so on so forth. So you meet however much drain field you need. So you can do sloped sites and we can do mounded systems. If you can't meet your vertical separation to your restrictive layer, you can kind of bring in fill and put them above ground. You can put them at grade systems and that really all comes down to your separation to again that restrictive layer.
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Yeah, zones. You can do multiple zones if it's a big commercial job and you kind of break it off into multiple areas, depending on how the site's laid out.
Shawn: Sure, sure.
Chris: You them as evapotranspiration systems down in kind of the drier, desert-y climates. We're actually kind of evaporating out a lot of that water. What else, Dennis?
Shawn: Interesting. hadn't thought about that one.
Dennis: Yeah. One of the biggest installations we see nationally, you know, there's new systems for new housing and then there's
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repair systems for, let's say, a system that's reached its design life or if somebody abused the system, like they have leaky fixtures, they don't know it, and it overflows. So how are going to repair that? So if you're in a house and you've been in the house 20, 30, 40, 50 years, or people before you, the house is all landscaped and there's fences and there's stone walls and there's bushes. How do I get to the backyard? So the great thing with chambers, you can literally pick them up and just carry them into the backyard and not have to have dump trucks take all down my landscape.
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So, homeowners really like it because you really minimize the impact to the ground, to their landscape, and you're in and out really quick. So the repair systems, the repair market overall is a very popular market for Chambers.
Shawn: Yeah, that's great. That's good information.
Chris: You were also saying what other applications and I know there's one little misconception is it's typically used for kind of smaller residential projects, but I mean, we'll do two bedroom homes and we've done
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I don't know, Dennis, what's the largest project to date?
Dennis: Systems over a million gallons a day.
Shawn: Oh, wow.
Chris: Yeah. So they're pretty flexible.
Shawn: Is there any limitation for that or…?
Dennis: No, it's just the limitation is how much real estate you have.
Chris: Yeah.
Shawn: All right. That's really cool. So there's a series of questions you guys probably get a lot. So I'm just going to kind of go through and give you a real quick list of like three or four questions that you guys probably hear quite a bit. But how many chambers do I need?
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What size should I use? Where can I get them? And how much do they cost? Sounds like a typical conversation.
Chris: Yep.
Dennis: Chris, go ahead.
Chris: All right. Well, the first one was how do how many chambers do I need? Is that the first question?
Shawn and Dennis: Yeah.
Chris: So if you own a home or your contractor, you're trying to figure out how many chambers you need. It's pretty easy. It should be right on the permit. If you want to dive in a little bit deeper and figure out how the permit
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came up with the number of chambers is there's two different pieces of information you need. It is the flow rate, which will come from the number of bedrooms for the home. And then also the soil application rate. There's a lot of different terms. There's loading rate, application rate, long-term acceptance rate. They all essentially mean the same thing, but those are the two pieces of information you need. And that loading rate comes from a test pit that's done and performed on site by a soil scientist or an engineer who
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digs a deep test pit, analyzes the soil, may or may not do a PERC test, and then determines that loading rate. And so with those two values, your flow rate and your soil loading rate, you can calculate how much infiltrative surface that drain field needs based on that soil. And then you can take the approved rating or reduction and calculate how many chambers you'll need. But again, it's typically just like a lot of things that are pre-engineered.
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It's cookie cutter. You pick it out of a table and you figure out how many bedrooms, what's your soil loading rate. You go across and it tells you right there how many chambers you need.
Dennis: Yeah. So Chris gave kind of our funny reply because you can imagine Friday afternoons in the summer, we get a call, a call from a homeowner, right? And they say, Hey, how many of those chamber things do I need? So immediately we've learned over the years, Hey, this is a homeowner going to do an unpermitted system with, you know, their,
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their uncle has a backhoe or something. Oh yeah. So we've learned over the years that, our joke is, hey, the number of chambers is really easy to figure out. right there on your permit. And then there's like crickets on the phone as they go, Oh, well, uh, what if I have, you know, two bathrooms, how many chambers do I need? And so we kind of know, and we, just educate them. Say look, it's really a good thing to hire.
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you know, a soul scientist or a septic designer. Every state is different. Every county is different in what they require for a designer level. Because, then you're going to get it right. It's public health. We don't want to mess with public health. don't want to have, you know, every kids that are getting sick or anything like that.
Shawn: Right. Right.
Dennis: And then when you go to sell your home, you say, look, I have a code compliant system. So we try and educate them because we can't just tell them over the phone how many chambers they need.
Shawn: Yeah, that makes sense. And I would suppose that that probably also dictates what size of chambers
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as well?
Dennis: Yeah, so the… the size is funny. We do, we do manufacture many different sizes and it's not because we're a manufacturer, we like to do it. It's really cause state codes vary. And so we have this, let's say it's a trench state. Okay. We only do trenches in this state and you only get credit on the bottom area in terms of sizing the system. Okay. We may have a shallow chamber there cause you only get credit on the bottom area. However, if it's a state where you get sidewall credit,
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meaning the sides of the trench give you more surface area to credit towards your amount of area required. Then all of sudden you're to go with a deeper chamber to get more sidewall. So we've had over the years developed different size chambers in terms of width and height to deal with the different state rules. And then for example, you say you're in a mound, we'd say, you might want to have a low profile chamber, a shallower chamber so the mound's not sticking up as high.
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So it's really a function of the code and then the type of system going in and what's approved in that state. Then we would select, okay, you want to use this chamber versus that chamber.
Shawn: Gotcha. Okay. And where can folks get chambers?
Dennis: We sell through distribution nationally. have over a thousand distributors and you know, they’re readily available and they're usually very helpful to the contractors in terms of training or we provide training directly to the contractors.
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And so therefore, you know, usually the next question is what's the price? And so we also defer to the local distributor for the pricing because if we have to ship it a long way or, you know, different market circumstances, they're going to charge, you know, what they can for the chamber.
Shawn: Yeah, you bet. Good deal. I think I hit all four of those questions. I think that was great. Thank you so much. So if somebody's designing or installing
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chamber systems, where can they turn to for resources and help?
Chris: Yeah, I'll take this one Dennis. Tons of information on our website. I would say that would be the first step. We also have a 1-800 number and a tech line that you can call into and ask questions. So Dennis and myself, we work in the technical services department here. I think there's maybe, I don't know, I think we're up to maybe 20.
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20 of us in the department and our main goal is to provide technical support, help out engineers, contractors, regulators, whoever's asking help on these systems. And so that's kind what we do day in, day out is help design systems, ask questions and put together drawing site design, stuff like that to try and help speed up the process and answer any questions that they have. So I would say, yeah.
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For information, for literature, our website has tons of great information, has state-specific information like design manuals, CAD details, all sorts of case studies, videos on our websites like pro tips or even installation videos. Yeah, and then the technical department.
Dennis: Yes, and we will, for example, if those homeowners are calling in because they want to try and do it themselves or something, we will, we can work with them, but we're not licensed designers in any states. So we would say,
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You want to contact a local licensed designer and a local licensed septic installer who's certified and legitimate. Because again, we're dealing with public health and we take that very serious. And so we help direct them to that. It's not just call up and we say, you need 20 of those chambers, off you go. We try and work with them and get them set up so they have a good quality system.
Shawn: And just for those who are listening, can you give the web address for them?
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Chris: Yeah, that's infiltratorwater.com.
Shawn: Perfect. Okay.
Chris: So just infiltratorwater.com.
Shawn: That's all one word, infiltratorwater.com. Awesome. That's great. I do have a bonus question for you. So what's the biggest misconception that people have about chambers?
Dennis: Good one. You start off, Chris, and I'll jump in with some of the old ones.
Chris: Yeah, the misconceptions. I'm just thinking off the top of my head, questions that I get, not all the time, but
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Like one of them is, do I need to run four inch perforated pipe down the length of the chamber? And that's a kind of a, it's a misconception. You don't need to run perforated pipe. So if you have a long trench, it's a hundred feet long, you just have to stub in your four inch pipe from your septic tank into the chamber only about six inches to a foot and then cut it off and let the wastewater flow by gravity into there. You don't need to run the perforated pipe because it's just, it's not necessary all that water under gravity is is going to come out within the first 10 feet or so. So that's kind of a misconception.
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Another one is filter fabric. You don't need filter fabric on top of the chambers after before you backfill with topsoil and cover. Yeah, those are probably the two big misconceptions that I get. What do have,Dennis?
Dennis: Some of the others are, know, people, engineers, regulators, you name it. They say, oh, those chamber things are new. You know, and they're really not. I mean, they've been around for over 30 years. If you look at the concrete chambers, again, no real difference performance wise if it's a concrete chamber or a
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plastic chamber, right? It doesn't really matter. The science is the same. And those been around since the 1960s.
Sahwn: Right, right.
Dennis: So it's really not a new technology at all. So that's kind of what we is one of the biggest misconceptions out there.
Shawn: Awesome. Good deal. Hey, thanks for the information, gentlemen. And thanks for joining me. I learned a lot today. So thank you so much for joining me on this episode.
Chris: Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having us.
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Dennis: Yeah, glad to be involved.
Shawn: Absolutely. It was fun. And you guys had some fun doing it today, too. So…
Chris: Yeah, definitely.
Shawn: So thanks, everybody, for joining us today. And please look for another episode coming out very soon. But hope you folks have a great day and we will be talking to you again soon.
We want to thank you again for joining us today. Before you go, don't forget to subscribe where you listen to podcasts so you're notified when new episodes are posted. Also, if you have any comments or suggestions,
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you can leave us a message through the contact link on our website www.orenco.com. Until next time, have a great day.