Running a pumping, portable sanitation and septic system installation business in the heart of Minnesota, Greg Posch has a lot of downtime between Christmas and the spring thaw. On most days during the frigid winter, Posch trades the pumping wand for a welding torch.
The seasonal workload at Posch’s family business, Tri-County Septic LLC in Holdingford, Minn., has been well established since he put his first vacuum truck on the road 21 years ago.
In the summer, Posch, 52, and his son, Keith, pump about 1,000 tanks, usually residential and often involving onsite systems and holding tanks at vacation lake properties. They keep a small inventory of portable restrooms, usually in use on construction sites and the occasional special event when the weather is nice. And last year they started squeezing in a few onsite system installations each year, as Keith became a licensed installer.
But in the winter, when service calls slack off beginning in December, Greg Posch trades one passion — pumping and providing customer service — for another — building vacuum trucks.
Building from scratch
Posch has the perfect background for building his own service vehicles. He learned welding in high school, then ran his own body shop for a decade before grabbing his first vacuum hose. He’s built all seven of his main vacuum trucks, the latest being a three-year project to transform a lightly-used L8000 Ford municipal vac truck with a hoist dump into a no-nonsense liquid waste hauler that serves his business well, cleaning tanks within a 30-mile radius around his hometown near St. Cloud, Minn.
“It’s pretty easy to put a truck together when you can paint and weld and cut and have a shop to put it all together,’’ says Posch. “Building from scratch takes a lot of time, but I enjoy doing it and I know when I get done that I’ll have what I want.’’
In addition to building his trucks, Posch does as much maintenance as he can. That includes oil changes and engine and brake work. It’s all performed in his 40- by 80-foot shop located on his family farm of 80 acres. The shop is split into two 40- by 40-foot sides, one unheated for storage and one heated and outfitted for serious mechanical work. The shop is stocked with welders, grinders, torches and a hoist to handle tanks and engines. A friend with a bender and shearer helps Posch out with stainless steel, which the pumper prefers to utilize wherever possible to make trucks that last a long time and don’t need repainting due to rust.
The Posch family runs the business out of a home office at their farm, where they also land-apply septage and grow cash crops. About 10 years ago, Posch dipped his toe into portable sanitation, adding 20 Satellite Industries Inc. Tufway restrooms that are in constant use in the summer. They run a 1995 Isuzu pumper with an 800-gallon (600 waste/200 freshwater) tank for the portables.
Father and son pump 2-3 septic tanks daily in the summer, a number that rises to 6-8 in the fall as cottage owners call for holding tank cleanings. Jenny Posch, Greg’s wife, does the bookkeeping and billing.
Ideas from expo
Posch bought the Ford for $12,000, removed and sold the vac unit, shortened the wheelbase, cut the frame and slid the axles forward to fit the 3,300-gallon tank. A nearby subcontractor cut the drive shaft to fit the new truck and Posch assembled the PTO. He added heated valves to keep the truck functional in cold weather, as winter sometimes brings emergency calls. He painted the tank safety purple for good visibility.
Tri-County usually keeps its vacuum trucks about a decade, selling them in good working order with less than 250,000 miles on the units. Keeping them garaged and clean, they remain on the road indefinitely. Posch’s first rig, a 1974 GMC with a 1,750-gallon tank, is still being used by another contractor.
The recent Ford project also figured into Posch’s favorite annual road trip, visiting the Pumper & Cleaner Expo. On his way to the 2007 Expo, Posch stopped at LMT Inc. in Galva, Ill., to have a plain steel barrel welded to two heads he recycled from another tank back home. On the way home from the Expo, he picked up the tank, then prepped it for painting and bolting to the Ford’s frame.
Posch says he scours the Expo exhibits every year, looking for tricks and ideas he can implement on his own trucks. He picks the brains of the pros who display trucks and shops for pumps, accessories and other components he’ll use on his next rig. The Expo and his own imagination account for many of the convenience features he’s adapted to his trucks over the years.
“I get so many ideas when I go down to the show. I picked out the best ideas and put them all on this truck,’’ Posch says. “And I’ve been building and upgrading trucks for so long, I know where all the wear points are and where I can use stainless steel.’’
