paul the original - 12/30/2013 15:06 When we have a problem like that, we all hope for a simple fix, and turn to the magic powders..... Reality is your septic tank is just like your stomach. It needs a lack of oxygen, and it needs to be fed a fairly regular diet of poo and other easily digestible plant and meat materials, and not fed a bad diet of a lot of bleaches, acids, greases, or soaps. Some are ok, but not a bad slug of them. Then as it works, it needs a place for the clear water to flow away, and it needs room at the bottom for the solids that don't diget to fall to, and it ends up with a layer of grease floating on top that breaks down much slower than the rest of the organics in the slurry in the middle. So if you consider it working like your stomach, if yours acted up, it had a problem. Either you added too much bad stuff. Or too much grease. Or some part of it mechanically failed, so the water couldn't drain off, or the grease was not trapped on top where it should be. Or it filled up with the dirt and metal and other tiny bits that never will digest. Or you fed it a whole lot of table scraps through a kitchen drain that overloaded it. Or too much bleach or harsh chemicals killed the special bacterias. Or it wasn't used and grew cold with nothing to digest and froze over in this cold spell. Or some such. Adding yeast does no good, as yeast uses oxygen, and a septic is supposed to be oxygen free. Adding the purchased chemicals might possibly restart a septic that had the bacteria die off, but generally having the whole family poo and flush adds the eacact same bacteria along with a feedstock for them to work. So the purchased stuff to dump down the drain is basically a waste of money. They do not help you except in rare case, and even then you have a free source you could use instead. Now, you need to figure out what caused your septic problem. Are the pipes broken, is the drainage field full of scum and sealed, or what? Did you wait 20 years to pump it and the solids filled it and now the sludge floated out into the drain field and wrecked your drain field? None of that will be fixed by flushing some magic powder down the drain. That is just wasting money. Paul