Throwing money down the drain … literally

So Thursday morning we had a bit of excitement at home.  About five, six years ago we had a sewer line backup that caused some (mercifully minor) flooding in one room of the basement, and at the time we purchased a little water alarm to sit on the floor in there to alert of us any problems.

The good news is, it works, and did, in fact, let Margie know that she should stop the washing machine right now.

The bad news is, of course, that it went off because of another backup.  So Margie called a recommended plumbing service and they got someone out there that day.

Now, when this previously happened, the previous plumber roto-rooted the drain down to the tap on the main sewer, out in the street, about 100 feet down the line.  And, at that time, he noted that there was some sort of problem at the connection to the tap, possibly some subsidence in the pipe, that could in the long term cause problems.

The good news was, his prediction that we would need root roto’ed every couple of years hasn’t come true.  The bad news is, the “long term” is, well, today.

The plumber reported  that he’d cleaned one section about 20 feet out, and run into no problems until (ta-da) 100 feet along the pipe, at which point he couldn’t go any further.  He arranged for a guy to come out the next day with a camera. 

I was home for the arrival of the camera guy and his assistant.  Here’s where things get “interesting” (cf. Chinese curse).  He showed me the video feed down the sewer line and where the 102-foot mark was, at which point clearly the pipe is offset with what’s beyond — presumably (at that point) the main tap.  The line had dropped about an inch, meaning (a) a four inch pipe was now restricted in flow to a three inch pipe and (b) the continued flow would continue to undermine things, which would cause it to get worse, etc.

We got  videocassette of the sewer line.  We somehow restrained ourselves from sharing it at the party on Saturday.

The helpful plumber then went outside, tracking the beacon on the camera, and discovered something interesting.  The fault was not at the sewer main tap, out in (across) the street.  Instead, it was in our yard.  Evidently, our line takes a left turn in Albuquerque by the drive way, and cuts over to the sewer line in what seems an inefficient fashion, but in reality I’m sure made perfect sense to someone twenty-five years ago.

On the bright side, he opined that our pipe up to the problem point was in “really great shape.”

On the down side, now we’re talking some serious work that needs doing.  Because (now a lot of this is based on what I was told, but nothing about it didn’t make sense) an important thing in the sewer line biz is “pitch” — i.e., the angle of the pipe.  They can’t just dig down nine feet at at the problem point and patch together the place where things join.  They need a consistent run of pipe at a steady angle (or set of angles).  So to get to where the joint is that failed, they either need to run a bunch of new pipe from above it to that point (joining up with the old line), or run something new from there down to the main sewer tap.  Which, of course, involves massive trenching in either case — including, if we would go the main tap (the recommended course), trenching across the sidewalk and street (thus closing the street down).  Joy.

So plumbing man starts writing up an estimate for all this work, which he guesses will be about $13,000.  Um … yikes? 

In the process of writing this stuff up, he mentions another way of doing this which avoids the trenching.  It’s called “trenchless replacement,” or “pipe bursting” — basically they run the new pipe inside of the old pipe, pushing it outward.  It lets them make use of the old course, and avoids trenching, and is a more durable material, and will have no joints, and will probably cure global warming, too.  I made up that last one, but he certainly seemed enthused about it.

However enthused, however, the estimate remained $13K (which didn’t make a lot of sense).  We can get 15% knocked off by signing up for a plumbing system maintenance service at $20/mo, which would also give us free plumbing service while it was there and so on and so forth. 

Joy.

Well, the problem is alleviated at the moment, but we do have something of a ticking time bomb on this.  We clearly need to get (at least) a second opinion and estimate — hopefully my sense that this guy is a high-cost operator will be fulfilled — but we are nevertheless looking at a very large chunk of change to solve the problem.

And so it goes …