Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Let it Flow

There was a little more house work done today... but not by me or Kyle. We finally had to call a plumber!
plumber

Yes that's right, we had been dreading the call for a while now. It started about a month ago, I'd do a load of laundry and come back to put it into the dryer and find that the floor was covered in water. This has happened before and it ended up just being a little hole in the washing machines drain tube that was easily fixed with duck tape. I didn't think much of it the first time, thinking it was the same issue so I repositioned the tube a bit and went about my week. Then I did laundry again a week or so later and walked into the same wet situation. And thought "okay next time I need to watch and see what happens". Another week or so goes by and it was time to do another load of laundry except this time I remembered to watch and see why the water was ending up on the floor and not the wash tub next to the washing machine where the hose runs into. Waiting, watching... hmmm.... nothing..... it all seems to be draining correctly - during the first rinse cycle so I left thinking it was going to be okay. Load finished and I come back to a water soaked floor. Great.... I'll try watching NEXT time. So about a week or so ago I stayed and watched the whole time. Sure enough during the SECOND rinse cycle water started to back up out of the floor drain, AH HA this is how the floor was getting covered in water. So I didn't do laundry for another couple of weeks. Then last weekend Kyle and I teamed up to get a couple of loads of laundry done, we'd let the first wash rinse out and drain down, just fine like it would. But then on the second rinse out we'd stop up the sink to prevent the floor drain from over flowing, and leave it in the sink for a couple of hours to let it slowly drain out. We got a good 2 or 3 loads of laundry done this way. Until a few days later when I wanted to take a bath, we did some dishes and probably used the toilet a few times that day... then the floor ended up wet again. This problem is just NOT going away so I guess we should face it. We stuck our little 25' tiny snake auger down the pipe by the washbin sink... no luck, we didn't even hit a blockage. So I called the plumbers. They had two different 'travel fee's' one was $59 for a 3 hour window of time and the other was $29 for an 8 hour window of time. So I took a day off work, to wait all day. Well they arrived, 4:59pm and the guy realized it was our main drain that was blocked and he didn't have the right machine on his truck and they would have to come back the next day. Luckily today I was only working a half day so I told them to come anytime after 1:00 (I didn't have to pay a travel fee.) So he arrived, and I'm glad because Kyle and I were getting kinda stinky from not showering in two days :-P

He brought out his big snake auger with the giant claw on the end.
snake claw
And started to feed it down the main drain. His auger was MUCH bigger than ours, about 100 feet total. The plumber was really nice and got a kick out of my desire to capture the moment with my camera. He was more than happy to oblige.
big snake
About 5 foot in he hit a block and pulled out a huge pile of tree roots
tree roots
That picture was just the first hunk. When he said that was just the tip of the ice berg I knew it was going to take a while so I headed upstairs to keep Harpo company and communicate with Kyle via googlechat. When I came back he had gotten a nice big chunk of feminine products out. Now I KNOW those weren't mine, for the fact that when we moved in here the plumbing was a little iffy and I wasn't going to test it by sticking any of those things down the toilet.... so who knows HOW old they are. But this is a very good reason to not flush your feminine products. They might say they are biodegradable, but this is proof they are not, those were probably down there for years.
feminine products
After a while longer the auger was finished and we were left with a bucket of tree roots (and tampons).
bucket of tree roots
Now it was time for the camera to make a sweep through to make sure the clogs were out and that the pipe wasn't crushed or damaged from the tree roots (which would have been a bad deal). This is the camera set up, it's a camera on the end of some fiber optic wires that goes down the pipe
camera
If you look closely you can see the remenants of some of the tree roots sticking through the seam of the pipe. There were many of these seams found along the way.
roots on camera screen
We made it all the way to the main sewer and the pipe was all in tact! Now we just need to keep this up, by having them cleaned out yearly so they don't over grow and cause our basement to flood completely.

And with that I am finished and hopping in the shower! WOO HOO I can be clean again!

Thanks for reading!

1 comment:

Tish said...

EEEEEEEWWWWWWW!!!!

I'm glad those pictures aren't scratch-n-sniff!

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