Last night Wendy announced that the dishwasher was pumping dirty water back up into the kitchen sink. This is not something anybody wants to hear after dinner, especially in the midst of a pandemic. Three or four hours later after disconnecting the plumbing under the sink and trying numerous stabs with a cheap hardware store 25 foot drain auger, we all gave up and went to bed. There's always tomorrow.
The next morning:
Of course we didn't want to call a plumber due to our isolation plan and the fact that Tim jr hasn't had his shot yet. (He's due to get his 1st Pfizer shot Friday) After I tried a few more times, unsuccessfully in the kitchen, Tim went up on the roof and inserted a huge and much longer 1/2 inch x 75 foot sewer snake (...inherited from Wendy's dad Howard) After a fair amount of physical encouragement and hard work the snake was forced around a few right angle bends and finally hit a mushy blockage of kitchen grease mung at 50 feet from the vent stack. Well, it could have been worse. It could have been winter!
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| Tim sits on the roof straddling the roof vent pipe where we accessed the clog. |
You can't take nice pictures of someone unblocking a drain so I posted this picture of Tim cleaning up after his success! Wow! We were extremely lucky to have a long enough auger! This could have gone very, very badly.
Bright Ideas/Failed:
Remove under-sink plumbing and auger drain. - Auger came out clean. (not long enough)
Force water from garden hose into the drain. - Water filled up the vent and overflowed on roof.
Cap off kitchen drain and force water down vent - Water leaked from vent stack inside wall.
Quite a few hours of dirty work and stressful worry went by before we finally got to the root of the problem and resolved the clog. The learning experience will allow a quicker response if (when) it happens again. Hopefully on another nice day like we had.
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