Fun with Plumbing

Garbage Disposal Bracket

A few days, maybe a week ago, my wife is cleaning strawberries in the kitchen and water starts pouring out of the cupboard and onto the floor. Not good. Investigating, I discover that the disposal is not perfectly vertical, it is slightly tilted. What gives? What gives is that only 2 of the three mounting hooks are engaged. You can see two of them on the ring at the bottom of the above image. There are three ramps on the flange that is sticking out of the hole in the bottom of the sink. You can see most of one and part of another in upper part of the image. These hooks do not just come undone, not without being hit by a car, bulldozer or similar implement. So what happened here?

I suspect that it has been that way since it was installed over a year ago at the tail end of the big remodeling project. Okay, that might have been, but why haven't we had a problem with water before? Stay tuned.

The next day the kitchen sink is backing up. (Think this might be related to yesterday's problem?) The drain must be clogged. Try the plunger, no help, but no leaks under the sink, so I reinstalled the disposal bracket correctly. Okay, let's try a snake. It goes in about 8 feet but then stops. No amount of spinning makes any difference, it's like we've run into a brick wall.

Drain King

I go looking for my Drain King, greatest drain unclogger ever invented. I know I had one, but it's been years since I needed it and it has evidently crawled off into the weeds. I drive over to Home Depot, expecting to find one there, but no dice. Whaaat? How can that be? Back home I check their web site and it is listed as Out of Stock - This item is currently unavailable. What's the deal, Home Depot? The place must have been taken over by commies.

Who else might have one? How about Ace Hardware? There's one here in Hillsboro, but they are out of stock, but the store in Forest Grove has one. I drive the five miles and they do indeed have one. Back home I hook it up to the garden hose and shove it down the drain pipe, turn on the water and wait five minutes. It makes the most god-awful racket, but maybe that means it's working. Turn off the water and by the time I get back inside the bladder has shrunk and been pushed out of the pipe and all the water that had gotten shoved into the pipe came running out and all over the floor.

I suspect that the drain from an upstairs sink intersects the drain from the kitchen sink, and the small stream of water that comes out of the business end of the Drain King was slowly filling that drain pipe. It didn't reach the upstairs sink so there wasn't more than about ten gallons of water, maybe only one, but it made a big mess when it got loose. Good thing we saved all those old bath towels.

It's getting on about five o'clock and I am at the end of my rope. I ask Migal, who's rebuilding a retaining wall in the backyard, if he knows a plumber, and he does. So about 6 or 7, Jesus (Hay-zoose) and his assistant come over and set to work. They have a TV camera on a snake which they use to take a look. They go after it hammer and tongs for like three hours with no luck. Decide we are going to need to cut the pipe down in the basement and work on it from the other end. We'll do that tomorrow.

The next day I run errands to pick up tools and pipe fittings. I'm looking for the old table lamps that used for work lights, but they too have evidently crawled off into the weeds. Hay-zoose cuts the kitchen drain (sawzall makes short work of that) and finds the pipe is broken where it connects to the drain.

T should connect kitchen drain

T does not connect kitchen drain

This is how we found them, just sitting next to each other

So not only was the disposal not connected to the sink, the drain wasn't connected to the sewer and it's all just been working fine, without a trace of a leak, since forever. I'm flabbergasted, I tell you, flabbergasted.

I mean, how did that pipe break? ABS sewer pipe is some tough stuff. The plumbing was redone about 20 years ago when we finished the basement, and there weren't any cars or bulldozers in the basement, so what the heck happened?

And what about that duck tape? I peeled off the duct tape to see if there was any damage to the T and there isn't. All I can imagine is that somebody hit this pipe with a sledge hammer and broke it and sent someone else into put duct tape on it, but the guy putting the tape on couldn't see the crack, so he just wrapped the tape around the big pipe. This is just spooky.

Anyway, Hay-zoos and his buddy got the pipes are reconnected and things are flowing smoothly. What clogged the drain so solidly, you might ask? Best we can tell is that it was egg shells. The drain from the kitchen runs about 20 feet with only about one foot of drop, so evidently a couple of drops of egg goo every day for umpteen years piles up. Drano on a regular basis from now on, my friends.

Electronic Water Meter
Shine a flashlight onto the meter's solar cells to power up the display.

That was last week. Yesterday I got a notice from the city that my water usage is above normal, so I go take a look, and huh, look at that. All the water lines are shut off but the meter shows I am still running about 10 gallons an hour, which will add up to a whole unit (100 cubic feet) over a month. So I got a leak in the pipe connecting the house to the meter. 3 Mountains Plumbing came out this morning and verified what I found. Their proposed solution is to run a new line of PEX piping which they could probably do tomorrow, for $10K. That's a chunk of change, so I called a leak detection service and they are going to come out Thursday and pin-point the leak for the nominal fee of $350.

We had a leak once before, I dunno, maybe 10 or 20 years ago. The line from the meter to irrigation system had been carelessly backfilled and the line had been depressed and eventually it cracked. I wonder if our repair was not up to snuff. If the leak is in the same place it should be a relatively easy matter to fix it. My only problem is, well, actually doing any of the work. I could do it but it would take me a month of Sundays. Maybe I can talk the boys into digging the hole. On the other hand my insurance agent assures me that my policy covers these kind of disasters, so maybe I should just tell 3 Mountains to go ahead. Still, it's a chunk of change to lay out on somebodies say so.