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Lots of houses in Italy are not connected to 'mains drainage' for foul water. Instead they uses 'fosse's to deal with the problem.

Mine [which I think is pretty typical] consists of 2 large chambers. Waste from sinks, loos, baths etc enters the 1st chamber, and is partially digested by bacteria. The resulting 'less foul waste ' flows into the second chamber where more bacteria break it down further into 'clean water' that discharges into the surface water drainage in the street [which then goes into a nearby stream].

The system can work smoothly for ages, but bacteria are killed if you use bleach when cleaning loos etc. Also - the use of fosses explain why ½ûÂþÌìÌà loo paper can seem so 'delicate'. It is like that so it breaks down quickly in the fosse. [Some English loo papers take hours to disintegrate - ½ûÂþÌìÌà paper does so before it hits the water!!]

Biological digestion performance can be 'assisted' by flushing booster packs [from the likes of WC Net] down the loo. However, at some time the whole system will fail/silt up. You can tell this by the smell that starts coming out of the drain in the street.

Then you get someone to pump it out and take the stuff away. Ours is cleaned out by a local farmer, who sprays the resultant sludge over the fields where his cows graze. We then buy his farm produced cheese and butter [the ultimate in re-cycling?]

Hope this helps

very useful, thankyou very much : )
Is there any way to tell if an old fossa might need replacing, or do they generally last as long as a house? this is not essential as we can just build an enclosure for it, but how much might it cost to have ours moved from the cellar into the garden (its a huge concrete block roughly a 1.5 meteres in diameter.) thanks again, Will

All being well - they last forever.

Moving costs - sorry, you need to see a builder - and the drain runs will need changing.

Surprised it is in your cellar - not an ideal location if things go wrong!!

quite! will have to see if its worth moving it...