Isle of Wight County expects to spend at least $1.3 million over the next year or two on costly repairs to the sewer system serving the town of Windsor.

Per a 1997 agreement, the town provides its residents with public drinking water while the county owns and operates the vacuum-powered sewer system, which is now 25 years old and over the last three months have seen increasing failures.

“If you can imagine drinking sold out of a can or a bottle with a straw and then putting 290 of those bottles on the same straw, that’s pretty much what a vac system does, except it’s not necessarily soda that you’re drinking,” said Uwe Weindel, the county’s director of utilities.

Windsor’s system is unique in that it utilizes one pumping station to vacuum over 60,000 linear feet of piping, Weindel said. Those pipes are made of iron rather than conventional stainless steel.

“The interior of the pipes are actually rusting apart,” Weindel said, and because the system uses suction, that rust “behaves as a sandblasting operation” on the interior of the pipes.

It’s not just the pipes that are the problem. Weindel said the system also includes fiberglass five- to 10-gallon pods, which typically serve two households apiece and rely on the constant vacuum pressure to avoid filling up. About a dozen of these pods are now “falling apart,” he said.

The electrical system in Windsor’s pump station is also 25 years old and “some of the components you can’t buy anymore,” Weindel said. “Understanding that we are facing almost a major replacement type project, what we’ve done is taken the first step, and that is to determine how to replace the core main line valves entering into the (pump) station.”

Once the valves are replaced and bypasses are installed to keep the system from failing, “we can start attacking what’s on the inside” of the pipes, he said, estimating that the valves, pod and pipe replacements and control system upgrades would cost about $1.3 million. That’s just the cost of materials and doesn’t include the labor for installation, Weindel said.

Isle of Wight County hasn’t raised its sewer rate of $7 per 1,000 gallons in several years, but may need to consider an increase to foot the cost, County Administrator Randy Keaton said. Weindel said from January 2022 through this month repairs to Windsor’s sewer system have exceeded what the county receives from sewer fees by $40,000 to $50,000.

Weindel said the long-term goal should be to transition some areas of Windsor to a more conventional gravity sewer system. The vacuum system, in addition to seeing age-related failures, is also nearly at capacity.

“Right now the limiting factor for growth there is this vac system; we just can’t add to it,” Weindel said.