Snyder Industries 300 Gallon Snyder Septic Pump Tank

Set in the ground, and what this sheet will not tell you about the hole

Start with the honest part. This is a pump tank and where it sits is a designed decision that belongs to whoever engineered your system, not to a product page. The sheet publishes no burial depth, no cover depth, no traffic rating and no bedding specification, so nothing here tells you how deep it goes, what may drive over it or how it is backfilled. Ask the designer, ask the installer, and ask us for the maker's own installation document before the excavator is booked. What the sheet does give you is the envelope, and the envelope is the useful part. Forty-eight and a half inches square by 53 inches tall is a compact hole by septic standards, which matters more than it sounds: a smaller excavation is less spoil, less shoring, less disturbance to a yard that somebody has to live with afterwards, and a shorter reach for the machine. The square plan sits square in a trench box and beds evenly on a flat, level base with no rock and no point loads under it, and 53 inches of height keeps the cover within reach of grade on most lots rather than needing a riser stack that is taller than the tank. A pump tank is also the one chamber somebody has to open again. Site it where a truck can reach it, where the control panel and the conduit run in a straight line, and where the manway is not under a drive, a deck or the place the trampoline ends up. Empty it is 113 pounds, which two people carry into a back yard where no machine fits, and that alone decides some jobs. Full of water the sheet gives 2,502 pounds, which is the load the bedding and the backfill carry, not the lid. Size the chamber against the pump, the dose volume and the drawdown you actually need in the tank sizing calculator rather than against the tank in the yard, and use the tank sizing guide to work out the working volume you are left with once the pump, the floats and the reserve are in it.

Two three hundreds on one footprint and a five hundred above them

The middle row is the decision most buyers are actually making. SII-5260000W94202 holds the same 300 gallons in the same 48.5 by 48.5 by 53 inch shell and carries the word preplumbed in its own name; this sheet gives it no empty weight at all, so none is printed here and this tank's 113 pounds is not lent to it. The sheet says nothing further about what preplumbed includes, so neither do we: ask us and we will confirm what that part number carries before anything is ordered, rather than describe a pipe arrangement the maker has not published. Choose between them on who is doing the work. Where a licensed installer is already fabricating the discharge on site and has a preference in pipe, valve and check arrangement, the plain tank is the one that gets out of the way. Where the crew wants fewer connections made in a wet hole in February, ask about the plumbed listing. The last row is a different question entirely: 5170000W94203 holds 500 gallons in a 60 inch square shell 63 inches tall at 182 pounds. That is about a foot more in every plan direction and ten more inches of depth for two thirds more volume, and the cost is the excavation, not the tank. Buy the 500 where the dose volume, the surge or the drawdown asks for it and the yard can take the hole. Stay at 300 where access is tight, where the spoil has nowhere to go, or where 113 pounds carried by hand is the only way the tank reaches the back of the property.

Pad already poured? Send its size to 866-418-1777 or in a quote request and we will match a row to it, freight to your ZIP included.

A four inch gasketed inlet and a twenty inch manway cover

• The discharge: the sheet's outlet field reads "1 Inlet, 1 Manway / Lid". That is a count of openings, not a size, and no outlet dimension is published anywhere on this sheet. We print no number for it. Tell us how the discharge and the conduit are meant to leave and we will confirm what this part carries before it goes on a truck.
• The inlet: a 4 inch gasketed hole. A gasketed entry is the one joint on a buried chamber that rewards care, so bring the pipe in square, support it outside the tank so no bending load reaches the wall, and backfill in even lifts all the way round rather than pushing a pile against one face.
• Access: a 20 inch manway cover. Twenty inches is the working opening for pulling and resetting a pump, so plan the riser, the grade and the cover so that opening stays reachable, stays visible and stays secure. A pump chamber nobody can open is a pump chamber nobody maintains.
• The pump, the floats and the panel: none of them are on this sheet and none is claimed here. Those are the designer's selection and the installer's work; the tank is the chamber they live in.
• Limits: the service limit is 130 F / 54 C and the warranty is listed as a 3 Year Warranty. No specific gravity rating and no max contents weight appear on this sheet, so only the 2,502 pound water figure is printed.
• What is not published: no burial depth, no cover depth, no traffic rating, no compartment count and no code listing. Ask the system designer for those and ask us for the maker's installation document.

Rules for septic work are local, and the answer in one county is not the answer in the next. Where the question is how the scope differs across borders and code families, the septic approval scope comparison lays out how those regimes actually relate to each other; take the specific answer for your site from your local authority, not from us.

Pump chambers, dose tanks and holding duty

A pump tank is the chamber that sits after the treatment stage and before whatever has to be reached uphill or at a controlled rate. On a residential lot that is a mound or an elevated field that gravity will not serve; on a rural property it is a lift between a house at the bottom of a slope and a drainfield at the top; on a light commercial site it is a dosing chamber that meters to a bed on a timer rather than on demand; and on any site it can be the holding chamber that buys somebody time between a pump failure and a service truck. Three hundred gallons is the small end of that work, and it is the right end of it when the flow is modest, the excavation is tight or the tank has to be carried rather than craned. The grey shell is a working colour, not a claim. When you compare makers on this kind of chamber, the useful comparisons are on wall, on openings and on what each one actually publishes: the Norwesco and Snyder comparison takes the two head to head, and the wider four-maker buyer's guide puts four of them on the same page.

Three plants, class 300, 115 pounds

The sheet lists three moulding plants for this part: Chowchilla, California, Marked Tree, Arkansas, and Philippi, West Virginia. It also lists five states it ships from: Arkansas, California, New York, Oklahoma and West Virginia. On a light tank that spread is the whole freight story, because the lane that matters is the short one and a West Coast, a mid-South and an eastern option between them cover most of the map without a cross-country haul. The freight class is a numeric 300 under NMFC 156600-02, and the shipping weight is 115 pounds against 113 pounds empty. Run your ZIP through the freight cost estimator for the real number; the listed price is before freight. At this weight two people take it off the trailer and carry it to the hole, which is why this size turns up on lots where no machine can reach the back yard. Inspect the shell, the inlet gasket and the manway cover on the ground before anyone opens an excavation, because the one thing you cannot do cheaply is send a tank back after the hole is dug. Bed it flat, level it in both directions, and backfill evenly around all four sides. Leave the manway findable: mark it on the site plan and photograph it before the yard goes back, because in five years nobody will remember which side of the tree it is on. Tape a copy of the spec sheet inside the control panel door; the next person to touch the tank will not have the box it came in.