Everything you didn’t want to know about sewers…

We planned mom’s memorial reception a couple of days after her birthday, in October. I was at the ASA meeting in San Diego, when I got a call from a friend about a problem at mom’s… the toilet had backed up as had the bathrub, and it was “raining” in the furnace room in the basement.

We got the plumbers (from Rayne) to clean things out, and add a new clean-out just in front of the house. It took a few days, much of which was just dealing with the office staff to get information about when the crew were coming to work.

Things were much better… and then it happened again. We realized that the pipes in the basement/furnace room needed to be replaced. So our regular plumber, Dan, did that in early January. Just in time, as the pipes practically fell apart as they were removed.

And then it happened a third time, while we were once again out of town. The guy from Rayne said that we should ‘scope the line — which we had asked them to do back in October. They showed up early, so we couldn’t see what they saw. We had to call repeatedly to get both the video and the bill. But once we had it, we could see that there were areas where the pipe was no longer straight. It could be what’s called a belly, where there is essentially a bend in the pipe, or what’s called channeling, where the bottom of the pipe is eroded away. In either case, you need to do significant work to fix it.

We weren’t sure if we would have to trench the entire line (60′ under the concrete) or could use one of the various techniques that put a new pipe down through the old one and “burst it” from the inside to keep the necessary size. Dan recommended we work with Crown Plumbing.

It took them a full day to dig everything out enough to be able to do the work. Crown came back a couple of days later to finish things off. They have a cool device that helps to pull the new pipe down through the old and then “burst” the old pipe so that the new is the same size as the original. I can’t explain more than that – but it’s sort of like what we do when we put in stents in arteries. That process took only about 3 hours. We tested, no leaks, so we are good to use all the plumbing fixtures in the house. Of course, we still have to wait for the formal inspection before we can fill in the hole again, and then will have to deal with the driveway repairs.