Monday Morning: Snakes In A Drain

This week started in a most inauspicious manner. Monday morning, as we were getting ready for the day, we discovered that the kitchen drain was clogged. Thinking that I had to get to work, Stella suggested that I could leave it until the evening. But I thought, there was nothing pressing on my desk, so might as well address the problem straight away.

The bathroom sink was draining freely, so it wasn’t a main line clog. We’ve had some experience with those in the past. The water in the sink smelled faintly of bacon grease, which implied the clog was close to the kitchen sink.

There was a time when we had quite a lot of recurring drain trouble. I had different plumbers out to snake the drain line at several times over a few years.

At least two of the plumbers offered to do a diagnostic, running a TV camera down the drain to try and locate where the real problem was located. They described what they found as low spots resulting from shifting ground, and root intrusion into the drain where our drain met the city infrastructure. The city pipe was apparently clay. This transition was supposedly under our front yard.

As I recall, they quoted us $6-8K to dig up the old drain line and replace it with new pipe. That was a capital project that would require some planning. So, I had them clear the current clog, but passed on the major project.

One time I had to have them come out on a holiday long weekend. That cost a serious premium, and inspired me to buy an electric snake so I could do it myself in the future. Since that time, I’ve only had to snake the drain a couple of times. At least we have the tool at the ready.

The house originally had ancient cast iron drains. Somewhere along the way, the cast iron drain pipe rusted out. That meant there was grey water from the kitchen starting to pool under the house. Faced with this reality, I replumbed all the drains with PVC. While I heartily dislike plumbing, I am handy enough that I could do that myself.

In the course of that project I replaced almost all the exposed cast iron pipe. There’s still one small piece that goes up into the kitchen wall near the sink. To replace that last bit would mean opening up the wall in a manner that would be more than I could remedy myself, to the PVC transitions to that one old piece of cast iron that goes vertically into the wall. That’s where the clog was this Monday.

Happily, I put a cleanout right under the sink, near the transition between the PVC and cast iron. Thus it was a relatively simple, if a bit messy process, to snake the drain in both directions. It only took me about an hour. Problem solved. Probably faster than if I’d called a local plumber. For someone whose day job is tethered to a desk, it can occasionally be gratifying to do some physical work.

“If the ladies don’t find you handsome they should at least find you handy.” – Red Green

By the way, we never did that major drain line replacement. The electric snake I bought is 75 feet long. The drain cleanout nearest the bathroom is only about 50 feet (as the pipe goes) from the sidewalk.

By tracking how much snake I was using to punch through a main line clog I was able to determine that the problem was actually under street! That made it the cities problem. I was able to have the city come and address the issue.

On that basis alone, the purchase of the electric snake was one of the better investments I’ve ever made.