So Sunday night we had invited Malia’s family over for dinner. When I got home Malia told me that when she started to drain the tub, the toilet would gurgle, not a good sign! I flushed the toilet and it immediately began to overflow, so this was already not starting out good. Things went from bad to worse in a very short amount of time. When I realized there was nothing I could do to fix it I decided to call a plumber.

The plumber I called was with Snake and Rooter, the guy came out and spent about an hour working the snake in the cleanout in the back yard. He pulled the snake out and there was clay on the end. Our house is old enough to have clay pipes so he informed me that the most likely reason things weren’t moving was because we had a collapsed sewer line. His rough estimate was about $10,000.00 to have the line dug up and replaced from the house to the main.

So nobody went to bed that night very happy at all, not to mention with no toilets nobody was very comfortable.

The following day I decided to call a different plumber for a second opinion. After my mom sent me a link from Roto-Rooter about how they could replace a sewer line without digging up the yard, I called them. It was a good thing I did. The guy was out at the house around 1030a and started to work on the clean out. He ran his line out over 100 feet and pulled back nothing but tree roots. He had difficulty running the snake back to the house so he went to the basement clean out.

He was able to run the snake out and pulled back quite a bit of tree roots. After that he decided it would be good to use a bladder to force water through the sewer to blow out whatever was stuck. That wound up not working and water backed up the outside clean out about two feet. During the time the plumber was working in the back he had brought a 10 foot length of PVC to help massage the snake into the right place and this was laying beside the hole.

My dad picked this up and dropped it down the clean out and started pushing it through whatever muck had worked it’s way up. He gave it two big pushes and you literally heard a loud WHOOSH and then the sound of running water! The PVC worked like a giant plunger!

With everything now cleaned out, the plumber was able to run a camera through the sewer, turns out that from the house to the cleanout is mostly PVC, meaning it has been replaced, and the good news is no collapse there. Moving out to the outside cleanout with camera the plumber discovered we have what is called a “house-trap.”

A house-trap is similar to the kind of trap that you have under your kitchen sink. These are no longer used in homes today but were common in homes built around the time our house was. He also said based on the amount of roots that he pulled out earlier, and how quickly things drained that there was no collapse from the cleanout to the main line.

So what started out as a very bad day ended up being a very good day! Instead of paying $10,000.00 for a new sewer line, I wound up paying $179.00 for the flat rate that Roto-Rooter charges. I would totally recommend them anytime to anyone!