Plumbing is not fun.
Last week I was faced with a minor clog in the shower drain. The water wasn’t completely stopped, but the tub wasn’t draining as quickly as it normally does. The sink and the toilet were flowing without a problem, so I knew the problem existed between the tub and where the drain line met with the sewer line. This seemed to be a minor issue.
Heather said that the water wasn’t flowing very smoothly, so she did a little bit of plunging. When she was done with the plunger the water ceased to flow entirely. This just went from a nuisance to a problem. It seemed that she had successfully moved the clog, but now it was a bit more compacted and was now watertight. I figured that perhaps I could clear the clog with a little more plunging efforts, but that did not help. I poured some baking soda and vinegar down the drain to agitate and “shake up” the clog. No luck.
I did not want to resort to using Drano, so I busted out the trusty plumbing snake and began to feed it down the drain.
The water flow started slowly, and seemed to increase a bit. It seemed like I was making progress, and so I continued to put vinegar and baking soda down the drain as I furiously plunged and plunged to no avail. After hours of this I decided that I needed to resort to using Drano, and so I did. I put a little bit in there and let it sit, then flushed it through with hot water. No real change. The water was draining from the tub, but very slowly. I poured more of the Drano into the pipe, and let it sit for even longer before flushing it through with hot water. Still, I wasn’t any further along than I was when I started using Drano. Eventually I used an entire bottle of Drano, and still got zero results.
I had had it by this point. I was very frustrated to have tried everything in my arsenal, including the last-ditch effort of using Drano – yet the problem still persisted. I resorted to using the snake one last time, and the water started flowing a *little* better than it had been… however, this time Heather and I heard an ominous splashing sound and knew that the water was going into the crawlspace, not into the sewer. This was bad.
I crawled under the house and confirmed my worst fears… all/most of the water that I thought had flowed beyond the clog had actually just leaked directly into the crawlspace. This means that gallons and gallons of water were now covering the floor of the crawlspace. Water in the crawlspace is not fun, but when it is mixed with an entire bottle of Drano, a couple gallons of vinegar, and a few boxes of baking soda, it is infinitely worse. I assessed the damage and realized that when I was pushing the snake through I dislodged the J trap.
After a quick assessment of what was wrong I started thinking, “This will be easier than I thought”. While it was disgustingly wet and smelled of chemicals, all that was broken was the trap just underneath the tub. Most likely the clog was right there in the trap as well, so I could replace the trap and be on my way.
Plumbing does not work like this. When you identify your problem, fixing that problem is not necessarily the ultimate solution.
After 3 trips to the hardware store (including one where I got a ticket for talking on my cell phone while arguing with my brother about the logistics of the plumbing nightmare that I was attempting to tackle on my own, but that’s another story), I had completely replaced the J trap. Prior to putting the new one on I made sure to run my plumbing snake down the rest of the pipe to be sure that there were no further clogs.
I went upstairs and started the water, then ran back into the crawlspace to look for leaks. No leaks! Awesome! I cleaned up my tools and headed upstairs, only to find that the water was still sitting in the tub. I had successfully replaced the J trap and fixed the leaks that I created, but the clog must have been beyond the work that I was doing. This was very discouraging, as the main sewer pipe was not far beyond where my snake reached cleanly while the J trap was disconnected.
At this point I realized that I could not fix this problem on my own, and I called a friend to give me a hand. Lee Colley, thank my lucky stars, came to give me a hand. He knew that I was very frustrated at this point, and that I had spent the entire day under the house. I was at the end of my patience and Lee knew. Since he had the more cool mind, and his skills were more in tuned with the job, I let him take over and became his helper.
We continued with the project. The idea was that we still needed to clear this nasty clog. We made a quick trip to the hardware store to purchase a hose-end device that you stick in the end of a clogged pipe. The device is like a rubber bladder that fills with water and prevents any water from backing up, then it delivers a high-pressure blast toward the clog. This high power blast pushed the clog right along, and soon we heard water flowing. This was music to our ears. The water was flowing beyond the clog. Excellent!
To get the bladder device into the pipe we needed to remove a cast iron elbow piece. There is a good reason that they stopped using cast iron for plumbing. These pipes were so old that the threading on the pipe cracked completely, and we were now missing a good chunk from the end of this pipe. This was no good. We just created a problem with an 8′ long cast iron pipe that led almost directly to the sewer pipe. Our task just altered entirely. We went upstairs to get cleaned up and noticed that the sink was no longer draining. The sink was draining perfectly the entire time. At this point we were under the impression that the clog was completely cleared, but it became obvious that we had pushed the clog into another drain pipe – the sink drain pipe.
Now I could not shower, I could not use my bathroom sink, I wasn’t sure if I could use my toilet, and Lee and I were both exhausted from a day of failed effort. Heather and I decided to head to her parents’ house to get a shower. Lee and I planned on starting the project again at 9am.
Lee showed up right on time. We started out by removing the 8′ long cast iron pipe. We worried that we might damage fittings further down the line, but we had to take that risk if we were going to fix this problem.
Our first attempts were met with a stubbornly unmovable pipe. We blasted the threads with a bit of WD40 and tried again. This worked perfectly, and the pipe slowly began to free itself from the fitting. We removed the pipe all the way without a problem. Now we needed to clear the clog.
Lee brought out his snake, which had more bells and whistles than mine did. Mine was just a coiled piece of metal that you shove down the pipe. His was the same coil, but had a crank that you could use to push the coil down into the pipe. The idea is that with the coil turning via the crank, the end of the snake would work its way into the clog. This worked amazingly, and what looked like a dreadlock that had been dipped in mud came dripping out of the pipe.
Never have I been so excited to see a mass of disgustingly dirty hair.
We now knew that the clog was gone. All we had to do was replace the 61 3/4″ long, 2″ wide pipe and put another new J trap on.
We gathered ourselves, made another trip to the hardware store, and attempted to find a replacement for this cast iron pipe. Of course, the place where we went did not have a section of cast iron that was that long. They even suggested that we wouldn’t be able to find a section that long anywhere other than a specialty supplier – perhaps we’d even have to order it.
We started considering replacing the cast iron with PVC, and quickly decided that this was our only hope of coming to a resolution. We got all of the necessary parts and headed back to the house to see what we could do.
This time we went back into the crawlspace determined to complete the project. We got the long section of pipe installed flawlessly. We put the new J trap in with perfection. We went to join the trap with the tub drain and the size was all wrong. We had a 1/2″ pipe trying to connect with a 2″ pipe. Crud.
We knew we had a very small gap to bridge, and that we were well on our way to correcting the problem. We only had to make one more trip to the hardware store… or did we? On one of my 5 trips to the hardware store I decided to get a bunch of gaskets, couplers, step-downs, and extensions – just in case they came in handy. This, thankfully, saved me one more trip to the store. In my bag of goodies we had a step-down from 2″ to 1/2″, which is exactly what we needed. We had plenty of extra length from what we cut off of the main piece, and in no time we got back under the house and made the connection. I yelled up to Heather, “TURN THE WATER ON!”. She turned the water on, left it for a bit, then turned it back off. No leaks. “IS IT DRAINING PROPERLY?” I asked. “It sure is!” she replied. “TURN IT BACK ON, AND LEAVE IT ON!”.
The water drained from the tub, and there were no leaks in the crawlspace. We did it!