6th December 2007

Fun With Waste Line Plumbing

posted in Property Management |

So, here’s a good one. I’ve had these tenants who for the third time in a year, yesterday called me at 8:30pm (no less) to say that their toilets were backing up (again). I know, a landlord’s dream, right?

The last time they called about this, I had to make an emergency (read: $$$) call to a plumber to come and snake the waste line from the roof because there was no (visible) clean-out installed. The plumber who came out reported that when he brought the snake back up out of the line, a bunch of tampons came up with it. (nice)

So this time, I thought for sure that there had put some crap (no pun intended) down the toilet and here we go again. Well this time I had the plumbing company bring their nice $6000 camera so we could see exactly what in the heck was going on.

What we found among all the toilet paper, etc. in the waste pipe, was tree roots. This was very interesting to me since there are NO TREES in the entire yard.

I t turns out that whomever worked on the waste line last (probably in the 70’s) used this weird type of coupling and a very small (at the time) root found its way into the pipe through the joint. After it got in, getting two of the best things for it, water and umm… “nutrients,” it just fanned out and formed a web in the pipe which then snared all the waste traveling down the line.

When the plumber dug up the pipe, he found a clean-out right next to the blockage. SO that was good at least.

The plumber cut out the section of pipe where the root entered and what was in that section aboulutely stank to high heaven (of course.) The plumber mentioned that “they” should bottle up that smell and sell it for christmas. hee hee

Below are some lovely pictures of the whole proceeding. Enjoy.

The old waste line joint

This is the old waste line joint along with someone’s attempt at a buried power line, no conduit of course

A close-up of the root in the joint

A close-up of the root in the joint

 

Cutting out the blocked section

Larry of Plumbing Masters cutting out the blocked section of waste pipe

 

What was blocking the pipe

What was blocking the pipe. Nice!

 

Snaking the line

Larry of Plumbing Masters snaking the line to be sure it’s clear

 

Joint after the repair

The join after the repair

 

Thanks Plumbing Masters!

Thanks Plumbing Masters! You guys rock!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under Property Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 6 responses to “Fun With Waste Line Plumbing”

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  1. 1 On December 6th, 2007, emily said:

    So the big question is, “how much did this set you back?”

  2. 2 On December 6th, 2007, Scott Ficek said:

    Great story.

    You are not going to want to hear this, but you are lucky. In Minnesota with full basements, you have to get a backhoe in and dig up most of the yard to get to the drain line (about 8-10 feet down). Looks like yours is about 2 feet under ground.

  3. 3 On December 7th, 2007, Clifford said:

    ARG!!

    Having flashbacks!!!

    Well, it’s fortunate it was a small section. I had to have my entire yard re-piped!

  4. 4 On December 7th, 2007, Bruce said:

    Emily,
    The whole scene cost about $600. $400 of that was due to one plumber screwing around for 4 hours on an emergency call.

    Scott,
    Thanks for the comment. I know, the plumbing company did mention a backhoe. Thankfully we didn’t need it.

    Cliff,
    Ya, I’ll pass on that! I did think I was going to have the whole waste line replaced at a cost of like $25 per foot (!!!).

  5. 5 On December 12th, 2007, MN said:

    In the future – we should be able to pour “nanites” down a drain and let them fix everything (without having to even get dirty).

    Nanites are the futuristic robots that are microscopic – and can travel in the thousands together to accomplish a given task. This is a concept that is popular in medicine – but I think it would be an excellent idea for the future of plumbing – because all the plumber would have to do is manage the nanites (plumbing maintenance engineer).

  6. 6 On February 12th, 2008, An Interesting Turn Of Events said:

    [...] properties are (freaking finally) back in the black. This means barring of course, the need to fix a plumbing waste line or god forbid a complete re-pipe due to a slab leak. And it’s only [...]

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