How often a Farmington tank actually needs pumping
The 3-4 year rule holds for most family homes on a standard tank, but it's not universal. A full house, a garbage disposal, or one of the smaller 750-gallon tanks still sitting under a lot of pre-1980 St. Francois County homes will all shorten that window, sometimes to every other year. If nobody in the household can say when it was last pumped, we treat that as reason enough to check.
What actually happens during the visit
We pump the tank down to the sludge, not a surface skim that leaves the real problem behind. With the tank open, we check both baffles, look the walls over for cracks, and confirm the outlet isn't sending solids toward the drain field. Scum and sludge depth get measured and written down, so the report you get isn't a guess, it's a number you can compare next time.
Digging up a lid nobody's seen in decades
A lot of tanks around Park Hills and older Farmington neighborhoods were capped and left alone for thirty or forty years, buried under fill, rock, and whatever landscaping happened since. We probe for it, dig it out by hand, and can set a riser while we're in there so the next visit is a five-minute lid-pull instead of another excavation.