A sewage-treatment website that shows the cost the trade leaves out
A soakaway's drainage bed silts up, and after roughly ten years it has to be relaid — the garden dug up, the gravel replaced, the pipes laid again, for close to seven thousand złoty. No sales quotation mentions it, and that is where the company's name comes from. The chart on this page draws that cost as a step rather than a smooth line, because smoothing it would be the easiest way to pass over it. Beneath the chart sits a figure more interesting than the payback year itself: after twenty-five years the soakaway system is cheaper than the biological one by only a few hundred złoty, because the bed has been relaid twice — and at that margin the decision is made by space on the plot, not by money. Which leads to the second mechanism, the one that matters more than any sum: a plan view of the drainage field over the rectangle of the plot. Fifteen metres of pipe per person, runs two metres apart, plus clearance for the boundary and the digger — for four people that is a rectangle twenty-four by ten metres, which simply does not fit on a plot fifteen by ten, and the drawing changes colour to say so. It is the figure that kills more of these projects than any estimate, and the one people usually learn about after paying a deposit. The form recomputes both mechanisms server-side and, where there is no room, says so outright in its reply rather than leaving the customer hopeful until the visit. The palette comes from a trench cross-section — grass, clay, gravel — deliberately without the leaves and water droplets this trade sells itself with.
