If you are buying homestead land in Idaho, you will need to install an on-site wastewater system (septic system) unless you are going to be living in a “dry cabin,” that is a cabin not served by pressurized water. Being able to have a standard septic system on your homestead will save you a ton of money. Non-standard septic systems can cost many thousands of dollars more than their standard counterparts. But, how can you know if your prospective property can support an inexpensive standard septic system?
The only way to know with certainty if the property you are looking at can support a standard septic system is to have a site evaluation done by the state inspector. However, that will cost you around $400 plus the excavators fees. Before you fork out that much money, you should check the public septic records for the area and see what type of systems your potential neighbors have installed. This will give you an idea of what you might be facing and help you decide if moving forward with a site evaluation is worth it.
In order to do this, you will need to run a septic permit search.
So, how to search for septic permits in Idaho:
- Step 1: You will need to find the parcel number for the parcel you are considering.
- Step 2: Identify the Township, Range, Section numbers in the parcel number.
- Step 3: inter that information into the Panhandle Health septic permit search page.
Below I give you a step by step guide for finding septic permit reports in Bonner County, Idaho. The same principles should work for any county in Idaho.
Step by step guide for finding septic permit reports in Bonner County, Idaho.
Step 1: Find that parcel number for the property under consideration.
You can ask your realtor for the parcel number or you can obtain it from the Bonner County GIS interactive map. This map can also show you a lot of other helpful information such as:
- Property boundaries
- Flood Hazard Zones
- Zoning and Land use information
There is a lot more information, but for our purposes and at this stage of property research, those will suffice.
Step 1a: Open the map and click ok to agree to the terms and conditions and find your property on the map. You can type the address into the search bar or simply navigate to its location.
Step1b: Click the “identify” button at the top of the map. It is a lower case “i” in a blue dot.
Step1c: Click on the parcel you want the parcel number for. The parcel number will be at the top of the little popup information window. Here you can also see the owner’s name and read the available deeds. Cool stuff!
The parcel number for our example is RP59N01W218540A
Now, with the parcel number, we can move on to step 2.
Step 2: Find the neighboring septic reports.
Using the information found in the parcel number, we can search by section, township and range, which will allow us to see all the septic permits in that section (1 square mile) on the Panhandle Health septic permit search page.
Let’s find the section, township and range in our example, parcel number RP59N01W218540A. They are contained in the 8 digit code following RP in the order of Township, Range, Section.
- Township: 59N
- Range: 01W
- Section: 21
Step 3a: Open the Panhandle Health septic permit search page.
Step3b: Select the Township, Range, Section from the corresponding search drop down menus. Leave everything else blank and click search. Now we can see a list of all septic permits filled in that section.
Step 3c: Simply click on one of the entries you would like to check to be taken to information about that particular property. On this page, you can read the actual scanned documents.
Step 3d: click on the link to the PDF documents and enjoy.
After you have read those documents you can use the back arrow to return to the list of documents. It is just that simple! You now know how to search for septic permits anywhere in Bonner County Idaho.
If the information looks good and you want to move forward with a site evaluation, we wrote an article explaining the process. You can read that article here.
Why is it important to do your homework and search for existing septic permits?
It is important to search for existing septic permits because of the principle of buyer beware. Relators and landowners want to sell the property. They may be unaware that the land is not suitable for a standard septic system, they may not care if it is or is not suitable or worst yet they may know but not disclose that information. It is our responsibility to find out.
When we were looking for our homesteading land we found three beautiful pieces of property, but they all had potentially major septic issues.
The first one was 10 acres of level ground with great sun exposure. However, when we dug down about two feet with a shovel we hit water. There was no way a standard septic system was going to be allowed on that property.
The second property had a beautiful creek flowing through it and beaver ponds. However, after doing some research we found out that necessary the setbacks from the creek would mean that we would most likely only be able to build in an undesirable location.
The third property also had a large creek that would have been great for generating electricity with a small water turbine, but again setbacks would only allow us to build a small location. It was in a FEMA flood zone.
We could have had the inspector out to each of these properties and cunducted a site evaluation. But, because we were on a budget and there were other properties avalabe we decided not to risk it.
Just be aware of potential problems and do your own research. You may just save yourself a lot of time, money and frustration.
I truly hope this article has been helpful to you! If you have enjoyed it why not consider sharing on Facebook, Pinterest or Twitter? That would be totally awesome and I’ll give you a virtual hi-five for it!!
Hope you have a really great day and keepsm:)ing!
