Robert I commend you for your personal environmental efforts.
For your problem though, and after your local environment description, I think you may be barking at the wind or tilting at windmills - not that I ever figured out what that means.
In the big picture what's the point? What if you get an expensive report stating it's from so-and-so's septic right down to the brand of dish soap you've found on a midnight low-crawl to his garbage can? If his system is typical of the area where all the leach-fields choke every winter and the entire neighborhood smells like sewage (we have one around here) you're not going to get anyone at the county to do anything about it are you? Even if you do it will likely be transitory and whatever is done will fail to continue to be done right or the septic will somehow be remedied about the same time pigs are added to the herd.
Meanwhile, this all makes you stress-out and hate your idiot neighbor, something that's easily as unhealthy as coliform!
Why not put in your own little water plant to deal with it ALL regardless of what crap (literally) comes your way. Doing this allows you to not focus on trying to get specific neighbor actions done and it also protects you FAR MORE than any other alternatives you can come up with. With a full treatment system you won't be caught, like you absolutely will be otherwise, by seasonal spikes or upstream biological activities you're not aware of. How does it help to take a test only to find you've been ingesting 'whatever' since some time after your last test?
Put in a little surface water treatment system and "be protected". These systems take a little more intelligent care than the average system but you clearly have the chops to do it and keep it running well. Having a system like this wipes away all the other aforementioned social/neighbor stuff.
I helped a PE CE put in a 'Surface water system' that used a surface creek to supply a $32M house in Big Sur below the highway. The source was a creek that ran for about a mile down a hill along the highway, under the highway in a culvert down another thousand feet to pond a 100 feet above the California surf. The pond usually had rotting leaves and vegetation floating in it. The water was pumped the thousand feet back up the hill to the little plant for treatment having used the pond as the storage. The plant was about the size of a garden shed. It was not technically sophisticated. You would probably need a tank to hold the treated water for your domestic use as apposed to simple pressure tanks after a pump. Usually not a problem at most places.
Here's what the plant consisted of:
A sand filter to sieve out the leaves and gunk.
A General Electric(?) Membrane filter system with two alternating filters that swapped to allow flushing while still filtering. (Looked like fat water softener tanks.)
Followed by a turbidity meter (the only technical thing) which was a light bulb and photo sensor thing.
Followed by an actual micron canister filter.
Who's output was chlorinated and piped to a 500(?)gallon baffled tank that was used as a time delay for the chlorine to do its work, before human consumption.
The water was drawn from the delay tank at a point to make sure the water took x amount of time in the tank before being used, and pumped into the "finished tank" a second 500gallon tank.
There was only the barest hint of chlorine in the second tank and if that bothered you you'd add a carbon filter at your drinking tap.
That was it.
I have no doubt you could maintain such a system.
Keith Cress
kcress -
