Never heard of pumping your scheidt water up to let it drain down above grade.
Guess it works, since so many of you have them/know about them.
Are the sand piles planted in grass, or just a bare pile of sand in the yard to look at?
They can be anything ya want them to be, it's your sand and your yard.
Common around here is to add a little topsoil and lay sod.
Gotta figure this, often here around me it's a 60 inch tall mound that's required.
To achieve that it requires 12 feet of slope around the mound, all four sides, to keep erosion at bay.
That requires a pretty big footprint for a 1000 gallon tank and a couple hundred feet of drain field plus the slope.
That slope works perfectly for a riding lawn mower to be able to get up and over the mound.
Some can't afford that much space so they put the system in a corner of a lot, build retaining walls on a couple of sides so they can encroach on their property lines eliminating the need for the 12 feet of slope on the retaining wall sides.
I typically, like many near me, add some extra sand to extend my slope on one side to a lesser grade so I can easily drive up on top my mound.
We're coastal, we get hurricanes, we flood.
A 5ft high parking spot comes in handy during King tides and storms that create tidal surges.
Pretty common to see motorhomes and other vehicles that are seldom used sitting atop septic mounds year round.
Some properties have pretty good soil for a septic system to start with so they can sink their tanks a couple of feet into the ground and just have a 3ft high mound.
It all depends on what your county engineers might require.
There can be a lot of variations.
Last system I did I called the most exspensive contractor in the county for a quote before I submitted my request for permit.
They gave me a price range of $7500.00 for a simple system and $17,500 for the most complex system our county might require.
The complex system required two tanks and a air blowing system that supposedly helps keep the little schit eating bacteria fellers alive in the drain field.
Ended up the county just required the simplest of systems.
I got more quotes and ended up paying $5,500 for that system.
These prices are probably on the low side, it's Florida, people work for cheap. Costs are hinged on a customer base that's living on fixed retirement incomes, they can't squeeze blood outta a turnip so they charge accordingly.
Once you've seen one of these mound systems installed you'd realize they could be homeowner done pretty easily.
Especially with the plastic septic tanks they use today that can be man handled.
It's just a matter of moving sand around and shaping it and gluing PVC pipe together. It's not rocket science.
You could do it with a shovels if you had too, everybody and their brother owns a little Kubota with a bucket on it anymore, that'd make it a breeze.
My last contractor showed up with a little skidsteer which worked out well.
So they can be anything from a Tulip garden to a parking lot.
Mines gotta big hole in it right now.
My dog likes to dig in the sand, he knows there is something down there, he can smell it and probably hears it at times.
He'll dig for a while then just back up and lay in that hole.
So it's his sandbox...
