Sewage problems and advice needed

[FPStewy]

Ok hear me out. I don't have access to a river or lake so I have a Sewage loading/unloading that was taking care of it.

Then I built a Sewage Treatment but it only goes upto 85% but I still have to get rid of the sewage.

- The only difference I see is that it's cheaper to get rid of at customs.

The problem is that this is only with 600 Pop and I have 5 trucks that are near non-stop. There's no way to have storage tanks or trains. As the Pop grows that means that I'll have a convoy of sewage trucks. I'd hate to see what it would look like at 20K Pop.

Apart from building miles of pipes to the river. Any other advice.

[MrKrabs]

Btw: Here is that mod I talked about earlier.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2791077685&searchtext=sewage

[potski]

Originally posted by FPStewy:

Originally posted by potski:

Play around with the settings.

I'll take your advice and I'll try again to create a water bed, I just saw someone doing it on Stream. I was just surprised by the amount of sewage it's just a tad over done and a better "balanced" solution is needed. Even with a treatment plant I still need to remove the same amount.

There's a water well for water and maybe for sewage a septic tank for treated sewage would be a solution.

Glad to be of help.

There is a septic tank - it's just called a sewage tank. There is some sewage storage in every building, but the devs realised quite quickly that this would always become quickly full and require a whole load of sewage vehicles at a Tech Office. So you can build in effect a septic tank outside of the building that allows much larger storage, and means that it won't fill up and overflow the instant the vehicle is undertaking its journey. Yet even that was a problem when these sewage tanks can be used to cover a large number of buildings in an area covering around 400m. To be realistic you not only would need too many vehicles (and then have traffic jams) but the storage tank should be much much bigger and then cause problems with construction costs, especially when you start the game. So their solution is to reduce the amount of sewage to 10% of "normal" (I think that's the number), if you don't have the tanks connected to sewers.

And this works fine if you either have one vehicle running back and forth directly to a single building, such as a factory, or to a tank taking the sewage from a couple of buildings. But this probably does not scale up to a whole city, and isn't intended to. No city in the world outside of third world slum districts has no sewers, and those slums are probably built alongside a waterway where all of their sewage is just dumped directly into it. They certainly don't have trucks picking up sewage.

My experience in UK is that trucks very very rarely collect sewage, and that is mainly from remote HOUSES, with plenty of land where they can build reasonable sized septic tanks, and they are used just for that one house. In Belgium where I also lived this is more common, but still tanks for single residences, not shared amongst all of the houses in a street, not for apartment blocks, not for factories etc.

In terms of the volume of sewage, I don't think it is unreasonable that the intake of fresh water matches the sewage output. Most of the water I use in my house is from the shower, washing machine etc. and the water that goes in comes out. Very little of the water from the tap goes into drinking cups of coffee. Because we don't see the sewage in our modern cities, we probably would all be surprised by the volume of it. And by the way, the game simplifies all of the "dirty" water classifying it all as sewage, when in fact we have drains and sewage pipes taking water away from our homes. I'm guessing that remote homes do not put their drainage in septic tanks, but can dump that anywhere into the local ditches that run into streams etc. So maybe in real life only 10% of all of the water coming into rural houses goes into the septic tank? But that drainage water certainly needs to be dealt with in a city.

[potski]

Originally posted by MrKrabs:

Btw: Here is that mod I talked about earlier.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2791077685&searchtext=sewage

Which is a bit cheaty :) And in any case still would need to lower the land as you see in the picture in the workshop, so that is placed lower than the positions of the sewage tanks, or you wouldn't get a downhill flow, especially on genuinely flat terrain. The "water" in the second picture in the workshop is using the water effect tiles I think, so that the land has probably been lowered, but not enough to hit "sea level" at zero altitude for the game to fill the depression with genuine water. And without that genuine water most of the sewage outlets cannot be placed down.

I have to say that I probably have that very mod and use it, but alongside a river or lake, and only because it can be a real pain getting buildings of any sort placed when they have to be part on land, part in water. These ones don't care if most of the building is in water, or a few meters away from the water. I like that. But I'm not going to dump sewage in the middle of a flat plain near a city, that's gross! My citizens deserve better than that, lol.

[MrKrabs]

I agree with you.
I myself I didn´t subscribed to that mod.
In my game I just dump the sewage into the river.
However I´m looking forwand to have it cleaned.

[FPStewy]

Originally posted by potski:

Which is a bit cheaty

It's a balance issue. I think it's also "cheaty" to not have to build a treatment plant.

The game shouldn't let you dump raw sewage into rivers, you should pay for it to be exported until you have a treatment plant and down to 15% pollution and then into either rivers or septic tanks.

But that's just MHO

[potski]

Originally posted by FPStewy:

Originally posted by potski:

Which is a bit cheaty

It's a balance issue. I think it's also "cheaty" to not have to build a treatment plant.

The game shouldn't let you dump raw sewage into rivers, you should pay for it to be exported until you have a treatment plant and down to 15% pollution and then into either rivers or septic tanks.

But that's just MHO

So do you think that in 1960 no towns and cities were dumping raw sewage in rivers?

[FPStewy]

Originally posted by potski:

So do you think that in 1960 no towns and cities were dumping raw sewage in rivers?

It's a game balance issue, why have a sewage treatment plant if no one needs to use it.

[Silent_Shadow]

Dumping sewage raw is a trade off.

If you dump it raw, then you will be reducing the amount of eligible living space (land) in your republic and you need to do it at least 1 km from your populations, which means a long pipe or a convoy of sewage trucks.

If you purify it, then you have to build an extra building and then you need to spend workdays and chemicals reducing it, but you can build it closer to your populations and much less living space (land) is lost to pollution.

With the current pollution system, it's a good enough choice.

[MrKrabs]

At the moment I dump all the poo into a river.
However I want to rig up a treatment plant sooner or later.
I would like to have some kind of an operational valve or an overflow to be sure that if the treatment plant can not hold up with the amount that the excess will be dumped untreated until I built some extra.

[Silent_Shadow]

Supposedly there is a setup with sewage switches that can automatically accomplish that, but I don't remember how it went. Something to search for I guess.

[MrKrabs]

I got a few mods of switches. I didn't check yet if they have priority mode available like the aggregate engines have.
That would help I guess.

[FPStewy]

Originally posted by Silent_Shadow:

If you purify it, then you have to build an extra building and then you need to spend workdays and chemicals reducing it, but you can build it closer to your populations and much less living space (land) is lost to pollution.
With the current pollution system, it's a good enough choice.

I have it treated and coming out 270m away and there's no pollution that I can see.

Can someone else measure pollution coming from untreated sewage ?

[Cullen's Hound]

Originally posted by MrKrabs:

Btw: Here is that mod I talked about earlier.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2791077685&searchtext=sewage

the septic tank mod is better if you want something realistic, my house irl is handled by a septic system and the leach field for the neighboring town is along the highway to the west of town by the creek. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2815878350

[MrKrabs]

Thanks for reminding.
I even have that mod.
I just didn't buit it yet. 😀
That could have saved me some trouble back in the years when I rigged up my pipe system.
My underground work is really a mess.
But it works.

[Silent_Shadow]

Originally posted by FPStewy:

I have it treated and coming out 270m away and there's no pollution that I can see.

Can someone else measure pollution coming from untreated sewage ?

It takes time for the pollution to build up to a steady level. if you want to see the steady output level faster, you can enable cheats and turn on "speed up pollution."