Plumbers in Mico, Texas

What sits in your garden, and who owns it

On a pressure system, the fixtures in the house drain by gravity into a sealed tank outside. When the level rises, a pump sends the contents through a small diameter main shared with the neighbours, often uphill, to wherever the district's treatment is.

Ownership varies by district and it is worth establishing which arrangement yours uses before anything fails. Some districts own and maintain the pump and bill for it; others own only the main in the street and leave the tank, pump, floats and panel entirely to the property owner. The difference is several thousand dollars on the day the pump stops.

Whoever owns it, the panel on the wall is the part to understand. It has a light and a buzzer, and both mean the same thing: the tank is filling faster than it is emptying, and you have hours rather than days.

What goes wrong, and what causes it

The pump seizes on something it should never have been asked to handle. Wipes are the main culprit, then grease, then anything fibrous. A grinder pump will chew through a lot and it is not indestructible, and these pumps cost real money to replace.

Floats stick. They hang in the tank and they accumulate grease and debris, so eventually one stops telling the truth. A pump that never runs or never stops is usually a float rather than a motor.

Power goes off. No electricity means no pumping, and the tank holds only so much. During an outage, cut water use hard: that is not advice about conservation, it is about how many hours you have before the tank is full.

Water gets in that should not. A cracked lid, a failed seal or a downspout draining nearby fills the tank with rainwater, which the pump then pays to move. On a shared main, everybody's infiltration becomes everybody's problem.

Keeping one alive, and how we work

Treat the tank as the reason to be strict about what goes down the drain. A household on a pressure system pays directly for its own mistakes, which makes the rules simpler to enforce than they are anywhere else: nothing fibrous, no grease, no wipes of any description.

Know where the alarm panel is and test it occasionally. Keep the lid clear and undamaged, and keep landscaping off it so it can be opened without a spade.

If the alarm sounds, stop using water and call. Running a wash cycle while a tank is already full is how a pressure system backs up into a house, and that is a far worse afternoon than a pump replacement.

We service pumps, floats and panels, and we cover Mico, Lakehills, Pipe Creek and the surrounding Medina Lake communities.