is it done mechanically or by people?
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I have a sewage treatment plant for my house that can process 500 gallons per day. It has three main chambers and a fourth, separate, collection chamber.
The first chamber is anaerobic – the really nasty, harmful to humans, smelly, awful bacteria and fungi are kings in this chamber. These basically eat/digest everything. This is one of the two Chambers that needs to be pumped for maintenance every decade or so, because everything that can’t be digested easily sinks to the bottom and just stays there. For instance, plastics, should we accidentally flush some.
The second chamber has an air pump, and aerobic bacteria will outcompete the anaerobic in an oxygen dense environment. This section is basically making alcohol and vinegar with everything that is left in the sewage at this point. This part is usually not pumped out, as the particulates are light enough that they fall into the third chamber.
The third chamber is the clarification chamber. The water here is quite still and the particulates left in the effluent fall out of solution and collect on the bottom. This chamber also needs a once a decade pump out. From this chamber, near the top, the effluent spills into a pipe and goes to a large (100 gallon?) Tank with a pump in it. When that tank is full, the pump moves all of the effluent out. On my property it used to spray over an area the size of a suburban back yard, but I’ve changed to a french drain, downhill, since I ran over the pipe with my tractor. Whoops.
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