You're Calling Frank Redekopp

Level Ground Construction is Frank Redekopp's outfit, out of Seminole. If you've lived in Gaines County a while, you probably already know the name. Call the number, ask for Frank, and say what you're dealing with — a new build with no sewer, a system that quit, a property you're about to close on. You'll get a straight answer on whether it's a job for us and what it would involve.

One Licensed Contractor, From the Soil Test to the Service Call

Frank Redekopp holds all four Texas OSSF licenses a septic job can call for: Installer I, Installer II, Site Evaluator, and Maintenance Provider. TCEQ issues those as four separate licenses for four separate pieces of work, and they don't have to be held by the same person — which is why a septic job so often gets passed between companies.

Installer I — installing standard septic systems: tanks, absorptive drainfields, leaching chambers, and pumped effluent drainfields.
Installer II — installing every type of on-site system the state recognizes, aerobic included.
Site Evaluator — performing the site evaluation that decides which system your property can actually take, before anything is designed.
Maintenance Provider — servicing and maintaining aerobic systems once they're running.

Held together, that means one company can carry your job from the first test hole through the permit application, the installation, and the servicing afterward. One schedule. One number to call. Nobody standing in your yard blaming the last outfit for what's in the ground.

These are Texas licenses, issued by the TCEQ, and they cover septic work in Texas.

Residential Septic Systems for Homes, Ranches, and Rural Builds

If your property isn't on a city sewer line, the wastewater from the house has to be handled on your own land. That's what a septic system does: a tank separates the solids, and a drainfield returns the treated liquid to the soil. Outside the city limits around here, that covers nearly everything that gets built.

We install new residential systems, replace ones that have failed, and do the excavation and grading that goes with either. That's the tank excavation, setting the tank, running the lines, building the drainfield, backfilling, and leaving the ground graded so water runs away from the house instead of standing over the field.

Three situations bring most people to this page. You're building on raw land with no sewer to tie into. The system that came with the house has quit. Or you're buying a property and the inspection turned up a system that won't pass. Say which one you're in when you call — it changes what has to happen first.

Building outside city sewer? Call Frank at (432) 209-5410.

Commercial & Industrial Septic Systems Across the Permian Basin

A commercial system isn't a bigger version of a house system. It's sized off how many people use it, how they use it, and what goes down the drain — so a shop with a crew of hands, an office building, a man camp, and a yard with facilities on it all get calculated differently, even when they look the same from the road.

Three things change on a commercial job. Daily flow has to be estimated and documented before anything is designed. The treatment and disposal method has to match that flow, which often rules the simple options out. And the review is heavier — systems above a certain size stop being on-site sewage facilities under the state rules at all and move onto a different permitting track. Which track your site falls on is determined before design, not discovered halfway through a dig.

We build commercial and industrial systems and the site work that surrounds them — access, pads, grading, and the excavation the install needs. If you're coordinating a site in Gaines County or the counties next to it, call with your headcount, your hours of operation, and where the site sits. That's most of what's needed to start the conversation.

Scoping a commercial site? Call (432) 209-5410 with your location and headcount.

What an OSSF Is, and Why Texas Permits It

Texas calls a septic system an OSSF — an On-Site Sewage Facility. It means what it sounds like: the wastewater from a building gets treated and disposed of on the same property, instead of being piped away to a city treatment plant.

The state regulates them through the TCEQ — the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality — under the Texas Health and Safety Code and the rules in Chapter 285 of the Texas Administrative Code. Two things follow from that, and they're the two that surprise people:

A system has to be permitted before it goes in, and inspected before it's used. You don't install one and sort the paperwork out afterward.
The permit comes either from a local authorized agent — a county or city that TCEQ has delegated the job to — or from TCEQ's own regional office where no local agent covers the area. Which one applies depends on where your property sits. Finding out is a phone call, not a project, and it's worth making early.

TCEQ also licenses the people who do this work, in separate classes for installing systems, evaluating a site, and maintaining aerobic ones. Before you sign a contract for septic work anywhere in Texas, you can ask which licenses the work will be performed under and check them against the state's public register. It's a fair question and the answer is public information. Ours are the four listed further up this page — Installer I, Installer II, Site Evaluator, and Maintenance Provider, held by Frank Redekopp.

Conventional or Aerobic — What Decides Which One You Get

There are two broad families of system out here, and you don't pick freely between them. The dirt picks.

A conventional system is the straightforward one. The tank settles the solids, and the liquid flows out into a drainfield — trenches or a bed where it soaks away and the soil finishes the treatment. Few moving parts, nothing to run, nothing to service on a schedule. Where the soil takes water at a reasonable rate and there's room for the field, it's the system you want.

An aerobic system adds air. A blower pushes oxygen into a treatment tank so bacteria break the waste down further, and the water that comes out is clean enough to be dispersed above ground, usually by sprinklers over a set area. That's what you use when a conventional drainfield won't work — tight clay that won't take water, caliche close to the surface, a lot too small for a full field, or a well or drainage feature you have to keep your distance from.

Aerobic systems cost more to put in and they don't run themselves. Texas requires ongoing maintenance on them, carried out under a service contract by someone licensed for that specific work, with inspections on a set schedule. Your permitting authority spells out the terms when the permit is issued. Budget for that part before you choose the system, not after.

Whichever way the soil test goes, it's the same phone call. Frank's Installer II license covers every on-site system type the state recognizes, aerobic included, and his Maintenance Provider license covers servicing them afterward.

The Site Evaluation and Percolation Test Come First

Nothing gets designed until somebody looks at the dirt.

A site evaluation is an examination of the property itself: the soil profile and how deep each layer runs, whether there's rock or caliche in the way, the slope, the depth to groundwater, and how close you are to a well, a property line, or anywhere water collects. In Texas it's a licensed activity in its own right, separate from installing the system.

A percolation test — a "perc test" — is the soaking half of it. Test holes are dug and presoaked, then filled with water, and how fast the level drops is timed. That rate tells the designer how much drainfield the soil needs. Sand that drains quickly needs less of it. Tight clay needs a great deal more, or it needs an aerobic system instead.

This is the step people want to skip, and it's the step that decides the whole job: what type of system you can have, how big the field has to be, where on the property it's allowed to sit, and most of what it will cost. Now and then it decides that the spot picked for the house has to move. Better to learn that before the slab goes down.

Frank is licensed as a Site Evaluator, which means we don't subcontract this step and then wait on somebody else's calendar to find out what your dirt will take. The same company that digs the test holes reads the result, designs to it, and installs it. If the soil comes back bad news, you hear it from the person who's going to have to build on it.

After It's Running: Aerobic System Maintenance

An aerobic system is a piece of equipment. It has a blower, controls, and an alarm, and Texas requires it to be inspected and serviced on a schedule by somebody licensed for that particular work — which is not automatically the person who installed it.

Frank holds the Maintenance Provider license, so the servicing your system needs can come from the same company that put it in the ground. Bring it up while we're still talking about which system you're getting, so the maintenance is settled at the same time as the install instead of turning into a scramble the first time the alarm goes off.

That goes for a system we didn't install, too. If there's an aerobic system on your property and nobody currently servicing it, call and ask.

How a Septic Job Runs, Start to Finish

Stages, not dates. Two of these are on the state's clock, not ours, and we'd rather say that up front than promise a calendar we don't control.

The call. Where the property is, what's being built, how many bedrooms or how many people will use it, and whether there's an existing system on the ground.
Site visit and evaluation. Soil profile and perc test, done in-house under Frank's Site Evaluator license. Everything downstream is set by what comes back.
Design. System type, tank size, drainfield or spray area, and exactly where all of it sits in relation to the building, the well, and the property lines.
Permit application. The design, the site evaluation, and a site plan go to the permitting authority for your property. We'll tell you before work starts which of us is submitting it — in Texas it goes both ways, and it should never be left as an assumption.
Review and approval. This is the wait. The authority reviews the application and issues the permit, and nobody on your side of the table sets that pace.
Installation. Excavation, tank set, lines run, drainfield or spray field built, then backfill and grade.
Inspection and start-up. The authority inspects the system before it's put into service. An aerobic system also gets started up under its maintenance contract at this point.

The honest summary: the digging is the fast part. The evaluation and the permit set the calendar, which is why the first call ought to happen earlier than most people make it.

What Determines What a Septic System Costs

We're not going to put a number on a web page. Anybody who does is pricing a system they haven't looked at. What we can do is tell you what moves the number, so you can see it coming before you're standing in it:

The soil. The perc result is the biggest single lever. Slow soil means more drainfield, or an aerobic system instead of a conventional one.
System type. Aerobic costs more to install than conventional, and it keeps costing afterward — power for the blower, and the maintenance contract the state requires.
Capacity. Tank size and system capacity follow the bedroom count on a house, or the headcount and hours on a commercial site.
Field size. How much drainfield or spray area you need comes straight out of the soil and the flow. It's not a choice.
Digging conditions. Caliche and rock go slower than sand. Depth matters. So does everything that has to be worked around — an old system, a well, buried lines, established trees.
Access. Whether a machine and a tank truck can reach the spot, and what has to be crossed, protected, or put back afterward.
Distance. Hauling material out to Loop or Lamesa isn't the same as moving it across Seminole.
What's already there. A replacement means the old system gets removed or properly abandoned first. That's its own line on the job.

Call with the location and what you're building, and we'll walk through which of these actually apply to your property.

Talk to Frank About Your Septic System

Tell us the town, what's being built or what failed, and whether there's a system on the property now. That's enough to get started on. From there it's one licensed contractor through the evaluation, the permit, the install, and the servicing after.

Call Frank — (432) 209-5410

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Monday to Friday, 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM · sales@lgctexas.com

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Septic System Installation in Seminole, TX