We had a fun, unexpected event last night — our sewer line backup into the house. Luckily, it was bath water from Jackson’s bath and not a steaming hunk of — well, you know what.
Since this is the first time the line has backed up in over 12 years, I thought it might just be a little clog. I went to my parent’s house and borrowed my father’s sewer snake. After a a good 45 minutes of trying to break the clog, I was beaten. Thinking that maybe there was a trick I did not know, I called my father to find out. As it turns out, I was unfortunately doing everything as I should have been doing. The clog was just being a nasty bitch. He then offered to come over and see if he could make any more headway.
Fast forward to 1:30 am. There we both are in my basement, 30′ of snake in the sewer pipe, and no progress made since 10:15 pm when I called for help. We are both cold, sweaty, broken men. We decide to call it a night and I will call the township sewer department in the morning.
So this morning, I call the township sewer department and they are out and on the scene in about 5 minutes. They look at the junction at the manhole in front of my house and see some clogging. They call in the Sewer Authority and they come with their big machine and suck/blow out the line as much as they can. I thank them when they are done and go back inside. I head back down to the basement and run some water down the sewer pipe. Nope. Still not flowing. I was tempted to try snaking it again but just felt like that would be a futile maneuver. I gave up and decided to seek professional help (plumbing this time, not mental). Within an hour, I had a Roto-Rooter appointment for this evening.
At around 5:30 pm I receive a call from the Roto-Rooter guy and he tells me he’s about 15 minutes away. Once he’s there, I show him where everything is at and he gets his gear. Out of his van some this ginormous electric power plumbing snake from hell. He goes to work and I figured this would take him all of five minutes, ten minutes top. Forty minutes later he thinks he has finally opened up the drain line. We do a quick double-flush test and he did indeed clear the line. We can now once again use our bathroom as it was intended to.
After the line was cleared, I was talking to him about ways to prevent this in the future. He told me it’s going to tough since we’re the first house in this portion of the sewer line. The line literally goes uphill from our line. Next, today’s high efficiency toilet don’t have enough flushing power to properly push everything thru the line. And last but not in any way least, out sewer line has almost no pitch whatsoever. That means it’s literally a straight run out rather than having a downgraded pitch like it’s supposed to have.
So basically in the end, this is a Shafer home and it is doomed in plumbing as it is in electrical and insulation.
