Where a Clifton drain ends depends on the road. The 1980s subdivisions around Springstone Drive and Centreville High School are on county sewer, which the county’s own map sends to the Upper Occoquan plant. Out on Clifton, Compton and Yates Ford Roads, the county’s plan for the Occoquan watershed says plainly not to bring public sewer, so the house has a septic tank and a drainfield. Inside the Town of Clifton, the most built-up part of town, where the Town’s plan says poor soil and a high water table made septic a struggle, drains to a county pump and haul system, and the rest of the town is on septic fields.
Water comes in two ways too. The Town’s plan says its houses draw from private wells, and the big lots around it were rezoned in the 1980s with no public water planned. On a well there’s no reducing valve and no street pressure: the pump’s pressure switch and the pressure tank set it, so pressure that surges and sags, or a pump that kicks on every time a tap opens, points at the pressure tank.
The ground matters inside the town. The Town’s plan rates its wettest soils poor for septic fields, with a high water table under more than four tenths of the town’s land, and says two of those soils aren’t suited for basements. If your lowest floor takes water in a wet spring, the sump pump and the line it discharges through are where a plumber starts. After a heavy rain, check that the pump ran and emptied the pit, then call us and we’ll look at the pump, its check valve and where the line lets out.
Nearly eight in ten homes in 20124 went up between 1980 and 1999, the stretch when builders were plumbing with grey polybutylene. A well pump cycling all day swings the pressure on whatever pipe you have, so it’s worth knowing which it is; one look at the line coming off the top of the water heater usually settles it.