To treat your effluent, you must have a CSA approved treatment plant installed. A treatment plant can also be retrofitted to work from an existing septic tank. Most treatment plants look and function like a normal septic tank. They have a chamber inside with air circulation at the bottom and usually some sort of media for bacteria to attach to and grow on.

Bacteria is what helps to treat your effluent. Bacteria, once established, will live and feed off the organics that enter your tank. The oxygen inside the media chamber helps keep your bacteria alive and thriving. It’s important, for this reason, not to dump strong chemicals down your drain, since killing the bacteria will increase the strength of your sewage. 

With a treatment plant comes moving parts. Most come with an aerator that requires maintenance to keep it operating. There’s also a control panel that manages ‘time dosing’. Time dosing is a method that delivers effluent to your septic field within a consistent time frame, such as for one minute every four hours. The amount of effluent delivered to the field must not exceed the design requirements for the allowable loading rate in order to give your field time to digest and allow water to migrate down before the next dose cycle.