OK, Tom, this is Stupid Mistake 37: You would think, after the clothes washer fiasco, the water bed fiasco, the kitchen sink fiasco, and others, that I would be the last person to attempt another plumbing project. I got back to Albuquerque from Florida to find: The garbage disposal in the main sink jammed. The bar sink on the other side of the kitchen plugged. I started yesterday morning early. I unjammed the disposal. It jammed again. Well, it's 13 years old, and mechanically noisy, and very dull. Let's put in a new one. That's a job I've done twice before in other houses. It took less than 30 minutes. I didn't even read the instructions. With our fancy-dancy new septic system, drano is verboten for the plugged bar sink--besides, there's a garbage disposal over there too. Let's try some boiling water. My lord, it worked. Wow! We ran water in both sinks--they drained! What luck had finally struck me! Had the plumbing gods finally looked upon me in favor? So we started the dishwasher. The first drain cycle it started spewing out the overflow drain, and backing up into the sink. OK, I hadn't really gotten the clog out, I thought. Break out the plumbers snake. This is one of those $15 jobbies with a 1/4-inch wrapped wire snake. It's worked before. I even know enough to start down the clean-out plug under the sink rather than take all the plumbing apart. So I start feeding, rotating the snake like mad. I get to the end--perhaps 25-feet-- and start withdrawing it, still rotating like mad, I get nearly to the end, and it sticks. Ah, I think, I must have gotten something! So I yank, and yank again. And yank again. As the snake comes loose there is an explosion of black gunk out of the clean-out hole. Ack! Ugh! Arrgh! You know that scene in Jurassic Park where the cute little dinosaur suddenly spits poisonous gunk into the villian's face? That's exactly what happened! I'm grossed out, which is pretty hard to do. There's foul-smelling gobs of black gunk all over my face, my shirt, my hair, and halfway across the kitchen. I am about to wretch. I clean it up. I do put the clean-out cap back on. Let's run water--hey, it's draining again. Let's try the dishwasher again-- Oh damn, it's coming out the overflow again. I give up. I call my trusty fix-it man, as I am sure the dishwasher has a clog. He asks, out of the blue, "Did you just install a new garbage disposal?" "Yes." "Did you knock out the plug for the airway?" Duh. "No." I followed his advice and knocked out the plug. The dishwasher drained on the next try. Success? Hah! Wait for part two, tomorrow.
Part Two So we started cooking for our Xmas tree decorating party. Things were swell for a few hours until blurp-blurp-blurp--both sinks clogged solid. I got out the snake, and went to the bar sink. The clog must be further down the line than I thought. OK, now how do you make the snake go down rather than up the vent pipe? Why is there a drain plug here if there's no way to get the snake to go the right way? I tried a variety of stuffing it this way and that. Always up. I look at the plumbing. The bar sink is in an island between the kitchen and family room. I have no idea of which way it runs after it disappears into the floor. Maybe I could use the bathroom plunger? Nah, whatever I pumped down one sink just came up in the other. That was it. I called a plumber. When he drove up, I realized that his snakes were serious snakes--perhaps 1-1/4 inch in diameter, in 25-foot sections, weighting down the back of his truck. He climbed up on the roof, and started feeding sections down the vent pipe. He used a fairly large electric motor to turn the things. What a racket in the kitchen as it came down the wall! At 75 feet, he came down. Still clogged. He shrugged and went back up. 100 feet. Stop to hook up another section. At 115 feet or so, the drains suddenly slurped and cleared. I got the bill. $80. Why had I even bothered messing around?!
I thought it would be $200--like an uninsured visit to a doctor! Man, this guy hauled a ton of stuff up onto a two-story roof, then back down. Now I know why plumbers are usually shaped like fireplugs, and are the size of NFL linemen.
Been there also Pete, with tree roots clogging the line about 20 feet from the house. Everything backed up inside and came up in the bathtub. Out came the plumber with his roto machine and cleared the whole mess up in about 5 minutes. I dug up the tree after the first roto job and a year later the lines clogged again as the roots lived on without the subaerial part of the tree. Out came the plumber again. A little copper sulphate flushed down the sewer every 6 months or so helps keep the roots at bay and will eventually kill them so hopefully I won't be needing the plumber again (at least for that task).
