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Water won't drain in my house!
Karpman
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I live in an older home. It looks to be in very good condition, though. The walls have a good coat of paint, the floors are in good shape, everything appears ok. The only problem is that water has trouble draining. The dishwasher (which is brand new, I saw it installed) always has water sitting in the bottom of it, and water in the kitchen sinks barely drains. In fact, when water is flowing into one of the sinks, it back up right into the other one. Thank god the shower drains pretty well. Drano has not put a dent into this problem at all. It just gets worse day after day. I have heard that a product called Thrift may solve my dilemma, but I have not tried it yet. Does anybody know of any other products or services to try, or is it going to take a plumber and a winning lottery ticket to fix this?
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If it's a septic tank, it might be full...
When I moved into my place, it took me about three months to clear all the old buildup out of my shower and bathroom drains, and the place was only 34 year old at the time!
You'll definetly have to call a plumber, unfortunately. Those liquid drain cleaners? Worthless, at least in this situation. While they may have worked for supabeast over the course of months, his situation involved drainpipes 1 1/2" in diameter. Your mainline is 4", and anything you try to pour in there is just going to slide through.
The exception to this is copper sulfate, which will kill the roots involved... but it will also likely kill the plant that said roots are connected to, unless they're fully grown trees. Even then, there's a chance that the tree will be affected, so if you don't have any love lost for your garden, copper sulfate's worth a shot.
And after the obstruction is cleared, remember this for using your toilet: flush only toilet paper, liquids, and what comes out of your body. Do not flush paper towels--they're the worst offenders, as they're designed to remain strong in water and will stay down there forever. Do not flush tampons. Do not flush q-tips (more to keep them from getting stuck in the toilet itself, which is nearly impossible to fix and often cheaper to buy and install a new toilet altogether). If you have a garbage disposal, don't stuff the garbage in before flipping the switch, but instead run the disposal while gradually feeding the garbage in, all the while running plenty of cold water (cold! hot water melts fats & oils, which then stick to the pipes, but cold water solidifies them and they pass through). Leave the water on for 30-seconds to a minute after turning the disposal off, to flush all that material through. Put a screen or an old pantyhose on your washing machine's drain hose, to filter lints out of the system.
A mainline clearing runs about $500. Your local plumbing rates will likely vary--it shouldn't take more than two hours, unless they have to go through the toilet. A separate fee for the machine itself is not uncommon (those things are goddamned heavy, and some models require two people to lift them), but over $75 is pretty shady. And, just a fair warning, most plumbers won't guarantee any work on mainlines, because of two reasons. One being that there's no way for them to know what kind of condition the pipe is in or what kind of use it's being put through, and two being part of my next point:
The ultimate insult is that even if you do have to shell out the cash to have the mainline cleared, it will happen again. Guaranteed. Some re-clog after a year, some take ten years to build back up again... but it will happen. I had a regular twice-yearly cleaning set up for one customer, and when I left the company they had just upped it to thrice-yearly because it became obstructed that often. But although it's a sooner-or-later situation, there are options you can take.
One would be to remove all foliage from above the mainline. This would require accessing your parcel map and finding where exactly the mainline travels, but it's still not 100% effective, as roots can travel a looooong way. The other, and decidedly permanent, solution is to dig up the mainline and replace it with plastic. This is inconvenient in more ways than one, obviously. You would not be able to use the toilet for much of the time (and certainly not when anyone is working on it), your yard would be almost annihilated (plumbing codes vary from state to state, but no state has their minimum depth under six feet... that's a six-foot trench running from your house to the street). And the cost is staggering--around here, $20,000 is not unheard of.
So that's all the dirt. But really, it's not as big of a deal as I've made it sound. You'll be out a few hundred bucks, but as long as you follow the TP-and-waste-only rule, use your garbage disposal properly, and generally keep an eye on what goes into your drain system, your mainline will treat you right.
Strange that your shower works, though, if it's the mainline. Your dishwasher may be draining into the sink pipe, which means your problems could be caused by a single clogged pipe.
Questions:
Does the dishwasher drain into the same pipe as the kitchen sink?
Are any other drains affected?
If it's only the one drain, you might try a plunger; I've seen it done before, and it does appear to work. (For a kitchen sink, though, use a new plunger, and block the other entrances (twin sink and dishwasher) up first.)
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Another trick the old plumber I worked with swore by is Dawn. Apparently it's really good at cutting grease, so pour a bunch into the sink and see if that could help. I have no idea why he advocated Dawn over other dish soaps.
Several times now we've clogged our sink up with grease and every time Dawn and hot water has unclogged it.
Its highly doubtful its something simple like grease, etc... my problem turned out to be lint from the washer slowly catching on the main line out of the house, hardening, and repeating this process.
eventually my large pipe was quite small. Drano, even the heavy duty stuff, did nothing.
Lucky for me, my blockage was reachable from my lowest utility sink by an off the shelf auger .. and i pulled all that crap out of there..
Look around in the yellow pages, etc... try and get a guy to come out with the auger with the camera in it.. that way, as you get your pipe cleaned, you can actually see the problem..
See roots? next time just get the aforementioned copper sulfate after the initial cleaning
See a collapsed pipe? Time to buy that water pipe insurance or shell out large bills.
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You didn't mention if there was slow draining anywhere else in the house. If it's just the kitchen it may not be the main line. Also, how well is 'pretty well' concerning the shower? If your shower is draining just fine you may have some sort of blockage upstream of the mainline. Usually the 2" or 2 1/2" waste line from the sink(s) dishwasher connect into the 4" waste and then out to the main. Showers/toilets connect straight to the 4" and then out to the main. So if your shower and toilet drain find, you may have a partial blockage in the 2" somewhere. I'd see about running a snake through just from the kitchen sink first (or maybe a cleanout near there).
Yep, this is what I had to do recently because a roommate ran a bunch of potatoes down the garbage disposal. You can get a snake for ~$15 from the hardware store. Make sure to get one with a crank.
In my case, I could not access the cleanout with the tools I had available. I removed the under-sink plastic parts (no tools required- they are all hand-tight) and ran the snake into the wall. Eventually I cleared the drain (you could hear the water draining down). I pulled the snake back out and made sure that nobody ran anything of any solidity through the disposal for the next couple of weeks. I installed a new set of under-sink hardware (less than $5) while I was down there.
If other parts of the house are draining properly, it's probably not the main. Especially if you can run the sink upstairs without your downstairs/basement drains flooding.
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