A Tale of Our Plumbing Part 1

Imagine our surprise when the first time we ran our dishwasher our sink backed up.

Lovely isn't it? Matt was trying to cook dinner at the time.

It eventually drained, but it kept happening whenever a large volume of water would run through our pipes. So off to the store we went to get some plumbing supplies. We got a snake and a sink plunger to see if it was just a minor clog. Well, the plunger didn't do anything, and the snaking.....the snaking still gives Matt the shivers. The upper part of the drain was clear of anything major. The lower part had a cleanout plug to make snaking simpler.

Very nice clean out plug in the basement

Unfortunately, as Matt found out, part of the issue was the basement lines weren't draining completely. So when that plug came out, instead of the small amount of water that he thought would be in there, a whole half gallon of water, sludge, and rancid "material" came gushing out and soaked him. Luckily, he had a big bucket so it didn't go all over, but, yeah, that was bad.

This is the solid part of the stuff that came out of the line, at least a pound or two.

 To top it all off, there was no blockage in the line.

However, all that water in the line got us thinking, and Matt measured the drop in the plumbing lines. There wasn't a low spot like we first thought, but the line only dropped a 1/2" over a 18' length. Plumbing lines are supposed to drop a 1/4" per foot, so the whole line should have dropped 4.5" over that length. Due to a massive floor joist that can be seen in the picture of the line above, the whole waste line had to be rerouted a whole foot and a half over so that the proper drop could be achieved.

It's always an interesting day when you have to drill five 2.5" holes through things

Hey look, Matt finally remembered to get a before picture!

And here is the after picture!

Finally, after days of trouble shooting and a good 6 hours of work on Sunday, the routing was finished and the problem was ..... still there. Not only did the rerouting of the pipes not fix the drainage issue, (though the pipe slope is amazingly perfect) it made things worse by breaking crud or glue seals on some existing pipes (you can see them buried in the wall in the previous picture, look for the old yellowed pipes). Now our sink backs up, and our pipes in the wall leak like a sieve.

At this point Matt threw in the towel and used the home warranty policy to call a plumber.