We have found a huge plot of land at a great price. It has stunning views and we could build our perfect house on it with pretty much no debt required, taking it slow over 2 - 3 years.
There is a sewerage works downhill and adjacent to it. I have congenital absence of sense of smell and but my wife has a sensitive sense of smell. We've been a couple of times and can't smell anything.
Any opinions or experiences?
You've just described our home, and we've enjoyed it for 14 years.
We live next to a sewage pumping station, and it's the best neighbor ever. The city employees check it at least once a day (so there's traffic in our cul-de-sac) and once a week the diesel generator runs for an hour (during testing or maintenance). When the power goes out on our street, the generator auto-starts and runs until power comes back. We've only smelled the classic sewage odors a half-dozen times during that 14 years. Otherwise it's by far the quietest neighbor we've ever had, and I'd gladly trade at least one of our neighbors for a second sewage-pumping station.
However it also attracts projects. When the city decided to upgrade the electrical transmission lines near our home, they parked all of their construction equipment there for six months. (It's the edge of a gulch so it required a lot of guys digging holes with jackhammers, and the new electric poles were lowered into place by a helicopter). When the weeds need whacking, an entire squad of two-cycle Stihl operators shows up for an hour of precision line-dancing. When the police think there's criminal activity in the gulch, they park a cruiser at the pumping station and sneak around to the gulch side with surveillance equipment.
The sewage pumping station moves it uphill (because, of course, sewage rolls downhill) to the treatment plant a half-mile away. Even though it's a half-mile away, last year we were treated to a constant noise of a diesel generator for nearly three days (another electrical upgrade). When they're doing construction projects on the treatment plant site, we can hear the jackhammering and bulldozers all the way over at our house.
Long-term, we have a great home and I'm never leaving. Short-term, there has been acoustic pain-- but no olfactory offense.
When you buy that land, you're starting the phenomenon of "encroachment". Municipal officials are quite familiar with the issue (especially around airports) and they're positive that you're going to start filing complaints and monitoring their operations and maybe even bring unwanted media attention down on them. They will probably not greet you with open arms to discuss noises and smells. Ideally you'd be able to go door-to-door at the houses within a half-mile of that plant to ask whether they're a good neighbor. If you're lucky, a Google search will turn up public records of the plant's behavior and any accidents. (Maybe they'll tell you when they're doing maintenance, and you could drop by during those times for a sniff.) If you're incredibly lucky, you'd be able to find a retired (or former) sewage worker who can give you the inside scoop (so to speak) on how the sewage plant does its business.