Utilities for Illgen Bluff and "The Falls"

Utilities.....
You turn the tap and water comes out.
You pull the plug and it drains away to "somewhere".
You flip the switch and the lights go on.
How does all this work for the homes at Illgen City?

Several folks have asked, so here's the deal.

Lets take the messy stuff first, sewage:

In a larger city, when you flush the toilet or drain the sink, your waste passes down through your plumbing inside the house, underground out to the main sewer line in the street. From there it joins the flow from the neighborhood streets in larger and larger pipes that finally end up at the municipal sewage plant, a multimillion dollar facility that separates, spins, aerates, settles, treats, measures, and finally discharges, usually to a lake or river, hopefully clean water.

In a small home in a rural area the process is somewhat different. After leaving your house, instead of joining the flow from your neighbors, it usually goes directly into your own septic tank, a concrete or plastic tank buried in your yard. Here, anerobic microbes slowly eat away at the organic waste products. Solids sink to the bottom and a mat of biologically active scum floats to the top. Between these layers is a zone of relatively clear water. This clear water is then passed to a "leach field" where aerobic bacteria finish the process of cleaning the waste. Depending on the soil type, sandy soil is the best, this leach field may be nothing more than a perforated pipe run several hundred feet through the sand. The microbes attach themselves to the surface of the tiny sand particles. When a pathogen passes the aerobic bacteria waiting on the sand particle, it's lunch time for bacteria and end of pathogen. Water needs to filter down through 3ft of sand to be thoroughly treated. If your yard doesn't have good sandy soil, sand is hauled in and piled in a long mound in your yard. The clear water from the septic tank is then pumped to the mound and allowed to percolate slowly downward through the sand layer. Surprisingly, the technical term for this is a "mound system".

The sewage system for Illgen Bluff is somewhere in between a municipal and single home system. The waste from each home first drains together through a sewer line down the hill into a lift station which is simply a tank with a pump in it. When the sewage level in the tank rises to a certain point, a pump starts and sends the raw sewage out to the treatment area located on the land to the south below the cliff. There it enters a septic tank, similar to the one used on homes but much larger. This tank holds and treats over 33,000 gallons of sewage. Rather than passing from there out to a simple leach field, it passes through a sand filter, essentially a several thousand square foot field of 3 foot deep bed of sand with a plastic liner under it which allows us to collect the clean water after the aerobic microbes have done their final treatment. At this point the water has been treated and you could drink it (um, no thanks, I'll pass) Rather than just dumping this treated water into a ditch or stream as was often done in the past, it is pumped to a distribution area constructed of several thousand feet of perforated hollow chambers buried just below the ground surface where it is sprayed from holes in a distribution pipe and allowed to seep back into the ground. This final step gives a new batch of microbes one more chance to eat up anything possibly left in the water.

This sounds fairly complex, and it is, but is necessary in order to protect the streams, rivers, and, of course, Lake Superior.

Treated sewage distribution chambers

Well drilling

Drinking Water: Water is pumped to each home from a central 10,000 gallon storage tank. The well which fills this tank is located at the fork in the road where the driveway to lots 2 and 3 turns off. At 500 feet deep, the well bottom is nearly 250 feet below the surface of Lake Superior. It is drilled down through layer after layer of 1.1 billion year old rhyolite rock, the same that forms Shovel Point and Palisade Head. Near it's bottom it enters a band of black/gray basalt. It is the fissures in the rhyolite and basalt that supply the water for the well. This water probably hasn't seen daylight in over 10,000 years, since the time of the retreat of the glaciers.
Water is first pumped slowly from the well into the 10,000 gallon tank. From there, separate pumps supply it to the homes. Because of the great elevation differences between lots on Illgen Bluff, there are three separate water systems. If it were all connected to the same one, the top homes would barely have any pressure at the tap and the lowest home would have pipes bursting from the pressure. The three leveled system eliminates that problem. The pipe from the water tank to the homes is large enough to supply water for some of the new fire sprinkler systems if you want to install them in your home.

Electrical: All of the utilities at Illgen Bluff are buried, including electrical services. Rather than having an unsightly power transformer and meter box at the end of each driveway, the electrical power is supplied from several central transformer/meter locations hidden in the woods. These have a cluster of several meters in one location, hidden by stone or vegetation. Buried conduit is installed beneath each road as it is built to feed this metered power to each home. Conduit is also buried for phone or cable service installation.

How do the utilty costs at Illgen Bluff compare to other places?

Knife River Sanitary District (sewer only) $19,600 initial connection fee, plus $792/year usage charge plus $60/year meter reading charge plus $800/year Annual Debt Service Charge;
Single family mound sewer system $14,000;
Water well drilled in bedrock along North Shore including pumps, tanks, piping, and wiring; $18,000;
Electrical transformer and meter base and installation $1,900;

The least you would spend on utilities for a single family home on separate acreage would be for a mound system,well,and electrical which totals around $33,900:

Your investment in utilities at Illgen Bluff is around $25,000 (which is uncluded in your lot price unless you are purchasing under a deferred utility option which allows you to pay for utilities only when you are ready to build).

Aside from your dollar savings, the real beauty of the Illgen Bluff utility system is that you don't have to cut down the beautiful pines just to install a sewer system in your yard, which would have destroyed the very beauty and solitude of Illgen.