Built from the Ground Up. Literally. 

Labor Day weekend, 1996. 

Pete Schmitz decided to pump his own septic tank. Pete wasn’t a septic tank pumper, but he was no stranger to moving waste. His excavating company had spent years pumping and hauling manure pits for farmers. He had the truck with a tank. He had the know-how. And he had the will.

On that late-summer weekend, Pete opened the lid to his home’s septic tank. Four years’ worth of toilet paper and hardened crust stared back at him. All he had was a 2-inch water pump to move the material into his truck, and that crust wasn’t going anywhere. 

Instead of calling someone else, Pete headed to his shop.  Drawing from his manure-hauling experience, where agitators were used to liquefy pits before pumping, he built his own mixing tool from scrap steel. He fabricated a shaft, welded a three-blade propeller, mounted a small engine, dropped his homemade machine into the tank, and fired it up. 

The crust was busted. The contents liquefied. It got the job done!  It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t powerful. But it worked, and in that moment, Pete’s wheels started spinning.

After researching the industry and finding nothing like it on the market, he realized he was onto something. The septic industry had a real need, and no one had built a solution like this.

That first homemade agitator became the foundation of Crust Busters — equipment designed by someone who understood the work because he did it himself. We didn’t start in a boardroom. We started in a shop – and in a septic tank.

That’s how Crust Busters was born.