Dishwashing machines need phosphates

True, but would it be harmful to the bacteria that keeps the septic working?

I ask, as my ex used bleach a fair bit, and I learned sometime after our divorce, that bleach is not good for septic systems. I never said anything to the landlord about it. I don't use bleach myself, but don't want to be flushing anything else into the tank that might cause problems again.

Jon

Is there any adverse affect to the septic tank? I thought phosphates from septic systems had adverse effects on clean groundwater.

-jim

The quarter cup of bleach you use in a load of laundry that gets flushed into the 1,000 gal septic system tank along with another 30-40 gal of water will have little effect on the overall bacteria level. Pour a full gallon of bleach down the drain and you might have a problem.

The liquids and dissolved chemicals float right through a septic system, over the two sediment tanks and through the leaching bed.

The chemicals have to go somewhere. They don't just disappear into thin air.

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-jim

The horizontal or tilt drum washers use vastly less detergent and water, than the top load units.

"Josepi" fired this volley in news:7YGSp.7053$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe13.iad:

Actually, you're fairly close, Josepi. They just disappear into 'thin' earth -- a layer only a foot or so deep.

And they do; Bleach breaks down rapidly into chlorine, oxygen, and calcium oxide, which further combines into calcium hydroxide, then combines with organics to form harmless soaps.

TSP breaks down into sodium salts and phosphoric acid, which combines with calcium carbonate in the soil.

TSP's only heavy-hitting harm to the environment is as an algal nutrient, where it causes fish-choking blooms in static or heavily-contaminated bodies of water.

LLoyd

You forgot the real enemy, grease. If it gets into the leach field....

I would imagine phosphates would encourage more plant growth in the leach field, eventually clogging it. I know some areas require 2 fields and a valve so you can alternate; presumably the one lying fallow uses up enough nitrogen to solve the issue.

Year+ agd, befire the crash, WashPost had an article on developer-built housing out past Dulles. They could not pass perc testing so they built sand mound septic systems instead.

New homeowners soon found out they were VERY limited re: detergents, bleach, etc that the mounds could handle. They were going into town to use a laundromat, etc.

Yaeh, and water would combine with your lungs and make you completely harmless when you aspire. Geeezzz... I never thought chemicals would combine with anything before....duh. I guess mercury is OK in our food too. It mixes with it.

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"Actually, you're fairly close, Josepi. They just disappear into 'thin' earth -- a layer only a foot or so deep.

And they do; Bleach breaks down rapidly into chlorine, oxygen, and calcium oxide, which further combines into calcium hydroxide, then combines with organics to form harmless soaps.

TSP breaks down into sodium salts and phosphoric acid, which combines with calcium carbonate in the soil.

TSP's only heavy-hitting harm to the environment is as an algal nutrient, where it causes fish-choking blooms in static or heavily-contaminated bodies of water.

LLoyd

I have a newer septic and it has a filter installed that is supposed to eliminate most of the problems, when it isn't plugged or displaced...LOL

Bullshit!

They use less, if you like dirty clothes. Too many people have experienced them and the trend is to go back to normalcy. Haven't you noticed how the three and four times the price front loads are down to the same prices now? The same thing happened in the 50-60s with front loads. This isn't the first time the public has been conned by slick sales people, only to return to the old way they came from with thinner wallets.

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PDFTFT. PHAFH.

-- Win first, Fight later.

--martial principle of the Samurai

Well, that's darned interesting. Reading about the complications of finding substitutes reminds me of the things those Oakite engineers were talking about.

So, I have a load in the dishwasher, and my box of TSP is handy. I'll give it a try. Thanks for all the info, Joe.

Welcome.

Do you think it's time to storm the EPA?

The basic problem is that they don't know when to just stop, declare victory, and move on.

Joe Gwinn

I have mixed feelings about it. I appreciate their problem. They're charged with reducing pollutants of many kinds. As a long-time fisherman and outdoorsman, I remember what it was like before we had the EPA. The Delaware River was a uniform gray on the bottom and the carp, which were almost the only fish living in it, were gasping.

Now we have shad again, and blueback herring, and even trout as far south as Lambertville, NJ. Atlantic Salmon have been netted in the Delaware Bay -- not quite ready to brave the river, but hanging around and hoping it will keep improving. They left nearly two centuries ago.

We lost one of the most beautiful and unique trout waters in the world when the acid rain killed most of the trout in the Adirondacks. That reached crisis levels when I was in my early teens. It broke my heart. I haven't been back for decades, although I hear it's somewhat better since stack scrubbers were applied to coal-fired plants in the Midwest, which is where the acid rain came from.

So I try to look at it case-by-case. It's not easy.

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's bound to regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've been charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.

A little bit of "lime away" Phosphoric Acid should have the same effect (and helps remove rust stains). Again, there's LOTS of so-called "lime away" that does not contain phosphoric acid any more too. For the dairy farmers - milk stone remover is the same stuff.

For restaurant workers - it's the stuff you clean the steam cabinets (buffet trays) with, as well as cofee-makers and - - - dish washers.

Auto body mechanics will know it as "metal prep" and plumbers as "res kleen" for cleaning the resin beds in water softeners (as well as descaling boilers)

Metal Prep and Res Kleen have a small amount of surfactant added that won't hurt the dishes or the diswasher. About a teaspoon or so per load.

Doggone. Before this is over, I'll be brewing my own dishwasher detergent. d8-)

Thanks for the tip, Clare.

look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I choose the former. And, I wash by hand so there has never been an issue anyway.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this hyper-individualistic society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just to do its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly dope is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a mayonnaise jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then get out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the carbon tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so most of it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's wax in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for a day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're fishing in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar, which will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone has seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet just stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing. It's just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many people are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest didn't see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all fell in the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money for nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor drain it.

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which we ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get the environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the prevailing attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the fact that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA regulation that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I was born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....

gigantic snip

there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the commons". We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that includes costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or rivers poisoned by phosphates are both good examples - as are the earthquakes in Arkansas from fracking, and of course photochemical smog. If we could price these things so the creator pays then the "free market" might work, but there is no practical mechanism to include these effects in pricing.