Bregmata

The house in which I live was randomly renovated over the years by a tribe of do-no-good piskies. These wee folk managed to rearrange the waste pipes that run between the main stack and the outlet to the septic in such a way that it actuall runs up hill for about 5 metres. As you can imagine, this roguish trick is the root cause of some number of problems.

Things hit a peak a couple of weeks ago. I got home from work Saturday to discover that the washer was disgorging its watery contents all over the floor via the downstairs toilet (and fortunately draining through a hole in the floor, another story for another time). After careful analysis, climbing up and down access holes to crawlspaces and cellars, I determined that there was a blockage in the pipe.

The fortunate thing about the piskie’s tomfoolery is that the waste pipe comes apart nicely at the low point of the run. We have been in the habit of crawling down under the house (there’s about 80 cm of clearance) and pushing the pipe ends back together from time to time whenever we hear the tell-take trickle. It was fortunate because it allowed me convenient access to insert my little 5 m sewer snake to try to clear the blockage. It was also unfortunate becaue the blockage was apparent 6 m into the pipe.

Now, pulling apart the two ends of the pipe meand having to drain the backed up juice by seperating the pipe, filling a 20 L bucket, closing the pipe, then hauling the almost-full bucket across muck while in a very hunched position, lifting it through a hole in the floor, then dumping it out by the woodshed. It just happened to be a -30 cold streak, and the liquid on your hads would freeze them to the door on the way back in. Lather rinse repeat. What came out of the pipes was not drinking water. It took about 5 bucketloads before the flow was slow enough to insert the probe.

So, after spending a couple of hours hauling sludge and lying on my back ramming cable into a pipe, I had to give up. I needed sterner stuff.

We tried bringing in the professionals. Unfortunately, living in the country means you have to fend for yourself. No local plumbers answer their phones (especially on a Sunday), and none of the experts from the city were willing to drive past the city limits to make house calls. So, plan B was to rent a bigger, more powerful auger and try again.

I rented a nice 50 foot hand auger with great big nasty teeth on the end of a sturdy cable. It weight about 20 kg and refused to fit down the hole into the crawlspace. It took a good deal of coaxing, jamming, and spatial manipulation to get it down, but eventually it got there. I had to drain the pipes again (please don’t flush) and made several goes. Eventually I felt the blockage give, rammed the auger home a few times for luck, and packed everything up. I was certainly looking forward to having a shower, since it had been almost 24 hours since my first contact with contamination and everything was starting to taste, uh, funny. It was much harder getting the auger out of the hole than it was getting it in.

The next day, things got worse. the pipes kept separating and would not go back together. It seems they had moved as a result of my augury.

Off to Canadian Tire I went to get DWV repair stuff. Yellow goo, stinky stuff, black bits, and sawblades. Back down into the dark depths I descended. Back to hauling buckets. By this time there was a veritable raving running under our house, and the back yard by trhe woodshed was a skating rink with a few rough spots that will be particularly green in the spring. I lay on my back with a chunk of schist under my head for over an hour trying to wrestle pipe ends into place. This time I also inserted a flexible rubber connector to help release strain as the pipes move. Finally, 72 hourse after it all started, our waste problems were alleviated.

And it turned out I was wrong. I wasn’t lying in schist. It was really gneiss.

I wonder what the little people will do for us next?