Clogged drain

Well, it's been a bit... again. We were gone for a week on vacation and I'm just now getting back into the flow of things.

Speaking of flow... the DAY BEFORE we were to leave for a week's vacation... the main drain in our house clogged. Ugh. That's such a terrible feeling.

I'd cleaned the house and did some laundry and I was washing the throw blankets we use on the couch. When I went to put them in the dryer... there was still water in the washing machine! We also have a utility sink beside the washing machine that the machine will overflow into when draining, and it was full too. Not good.

First I called Korte, because that's who we used 15 years ago when it clogged. It was about 1:30pm, and they said they could have a plumber there "sometime in the afternoon/evening." I went ahead and booked the appointment, but then called Roto-Rooter. They said they had a couple guys just finishing a job, and they would send them straight over. So I cancelled the Korte appointment. 

Two guys from Roto-Rooter showed up in 30 minutes. Since we don't have an outside drain cleanout, they were unsure exactly how to go about snaking the main drain. The inside cleanout is the old cast pipe, and the cap sits right up against the furnace (for some stupid reason). It wasn't likely to come out anyway - at least without breaking. At first they thought about pulling one of the toilets off and snaking through there. What they ended up doing was cutting the copper soil pipe that comes down from the two bathrooms. 

So, they cut the pipe and ran their snake with the root cutter through there. The guy worked at it for about 30 minutes or so. Then they patched the soil pipe with a rubber boot. All told, they were here for 90 minutes and it was $635! Wowza!! That's a bit more than the $168 I paid in 2011.

They said what we need to do at some point is have an exterior drain cleanout installed. That piping is larger and they can use a larger snake/cutting tool. It's likely that there are tree roots that have grown through the pipes outside, so it's probably only a matter of time before it happens again.

I was just relieved they got it unclogged before we left on vacation. Although I did still worry about it off and on while we were gone. One of those things, I guess.

I don't even want to think about how much it will cost to have someone put an exterior cleanout in...