Septic system excavation and installation in the Finger Lakes

Most of Ontario County outside the city and villages is on septic. Every farmhouse in Gorham, every lake cottage in Middlesex, every new build on a five-acre lot in Bristol depends on a tank and a leach field working quietly in the yard. When they stop working quietly, it's an excavation job.

We install complete conventional systems — tank, distribution box, and absorption trenches or beds — and the raised and alternative systems that tight lots and slow soils sometimes require. We also replace failed leach fields, set new tanks when old steel or concrete ones give out, and dig and repair the sewer line between the house and the tank.

Septic in New York runs through the county health department. The design has to be done or approved by a licensed engineer or the department, the soil has to be tested, and the installation gets inspected before it's covered. We work inside that process every week and we'll walk you through it.

Septic in Ontario County: clay, slope, and the health department

The soils that make farming good here make septic hard. Heavy clay percs slowly, and a lot of lots between Canandaigua and Geneva fail a standard perc test outright. That doesn't mean you can't build — it means the design will call for a larger absorption area, a raised bed, or an alternative system, and the excavation gets bigger accordingly.

Lakefront lots have their own math. Setbacks from the lake, from wells, and from property lines shrink the usable area, and steep grades push designs toward pumped or raised systems. The watershed council and the towns around Canandaigua Lake are strict about it, and for good reason. If you're buying a lake property with an older system, get it inspected before closing — replacing one on a tight shore lot is a serious project.

For repairs, the failures we see most are old steel tanks that have rusted through, leach fields that have biomat-sealed after 30 or 40 years, and distribution boxes that have shifted so one trench takes everything. Each one has a different fix, and none of them are solved by pumping the tank more often.