soil pipe headache

[ree]

sooey and Mikefromlondon,

Perhaps you had noticed my Tue @ 11:23 post? The post where i offered four suggestions for clearing the blockage in the pic. One of the suggestions (pulling the bath waste) had actually been offered in an earlier post by user name Madrab.

"Poking" is not how i do things, neither was a rod the only offering. Portable snakes - made portable for this very purpose of working at height or in difficult locations - are available, so are extremely lightweight power (cordless drills) rods.

Why working from a tied-in ladder at eaves height would be more unsafe than struggling to dismantle the vent stack portion is beyond me.

However, i agree & hold my hands up that it would have been best to start at the bath waste.

 

[ree]

Hugh Jaleak,

You take my ref to a "rule" out of the context that i gave - dishonest argumentation. I made clear that the "rule" was informal & obviously only used the word to make clear my point.

My point being that i've worked for plumbing contractors with professional drain cleaners on staff, and seen many other drain cleaners in operation - not a single one of them advised "rodding" upstream unless particular circumstances needed it.

In the above case we are not talking about sewers but vertical S&VP's.

Mess is avoidable, any of the drain guys i refer to would have been instantly sacked if they had done what you suggest, and created a mess, just so they could investigate.

AAMOI: accepting your theory of an underground blockage - where would you "hose down" the mess to? Given the underground blockage, and the head of sewage in the stack the gulley would be bubbling over. Are you seriously saying that you have no objection to working in such conditions?

 

[Mikefromlondon]

Perhaps, .................remove the bathroom waste from the boss socket and examine the cut hole in the soil pipe - they are sometimes left ragged and paper can catch on them.

.

I see! I hadn't noticed that you had already suggested the best option to start with, with less danger of falling from tall ladders rodding from heights at stack or eves level.

But even pulling out that bath waste from the main stack should be approached with caution, if you are going to need a lot of pull, your body may suddenly lose balance and you risk falling over as the pipe comes off suddenly, from the main stack, so indeed play safe and tie the ladder to stop it from moving when it may experience a reaction force. when a pulling pressure is applied to the bath waste pipe to try and remove it out of the stack boss, often these are glued in.

 

[Hugh Jaleak]

Ree: My initial investigations when arriving on any site would be to try and establish what exactly is blocked, and then where it runs to, and any other drain runs in the vicinity. One can then work out a plan of action as to how to go about attempting to clear the blockage. I merely pointed out that the OP was able to rod in either direction, there is no barrier to working in either direction from the rodding eye, after being accused of 're-inventing the book'!

Sadly, whilst rules have always been in place regarding the design and construction of UK drainage systems, they have not always been followed, and nothing on site is ever out of a textbook. In the ideal world you would always work upstream from an empty chamber, towards the blockage, however practically, this is not always possible.

Many times I have attended blocked gullies which are on a blind connection to the main. There is no option but to work from the gulley itself, and when jetting, the backed up effluent always rises and spills out with the addition of the jetting water until the blockage has been removed and the flow subsides in the direction intended.

Until the position of the underground blockage is ascertained and the blockage cleared, all options must be considered. Once the pipework is clear then removing the jetting nozzle from the jetter hose allows the operator to hose down any residual mess to a convenient point.

Whilst paddling in the stuff is never ideal, there are times it cannot be avoided! When you attend a busy pumping station that is sitting in its own lake due to failed pumps, you may have little option but to wade in to reset the pumps or connect a hose to start tankering.

 

[Nige F]

Ree = Softus on a bad day

 

[ree]

Its a waste of time arguing with someone who constantly takes the discussion out of context, and then goes off page completely with extraneous & pretentious details about this and that.

FWIW: What if, with the underground blockage, the bubbling gulley, and a backyard of sewage, it becomes necessary to dig. How will you clean up the mess of sewage that you've just created? Its not a "residual mess" - what a slippy euphemism - its sewage that you have just introduced into a householders backyard.

Please, no answer that involves visits to a pumping stations or how jet nozzles work.

 

[Hugh Jaleak]

I didn't realise I was arguing or taking things out of context, merely explaining how I, (and no doubt many others), deal (or have dealt) with such situations on a daily basis for many years. If it is necessary to dig then any spillage of effluent can be swept up, (the water will soak away or dry up, leaving a residue which can then be shovelled up and disposed of accordingly, however if a tanker is available then the area can be washed down, and the residue vacuumed up, and the site sanitised before finishing.

I fear I may be going off topic, but FWIW I am employed by a water company, and part of my job involves operating heavy duty jetting equipment to clean sewers. Prior to that I spent a number of years working for the local Council, where part of my job there was dealing with sewer blockages. Please do not lecture me on the etiquette of cleaning and unblocking drains!

 

[spiffy]

Hey guys, You are all awesome for all the discussion. It helped me not sound like a doofus to the plumber, who, if he were not such a nice guy, potentially could have made more of it than it was. But he wasn't, he's great, and knew exactly what he was doing.

So, first off, he opened the trap that the previous plumber had cut and ran a camera on an a bendy arm down to find the blockage. As he guessed before doing so, and as some of you mentioned, the previous plumber, in an attempt to not have the bath drain leak onto our boiler egress (as someone else mentioned) had cut too long a pipe and so it was intruding on the main vertical pipe.

Most probably the previous drain jet had cleared enough paper to flow normally but enough was left and then compacted by the stream (that he couldn't see without a camera) that it had blocked up again in days.

The soil pipe pieces in the middle were indeed push fit so he took it apart.. the paper was wadded as thick and compacted as anything you've ever seen. Cut the bath pipe shorter. He did mention with time it is possible however unlikely that the pipe would work outwards and leak, and that if it did he'd come back and use the proper size pipe, the way it had ought to have been done in the first place.

Anyway, .. for now, fixed!

 

[Nige F]

Well I take my hat off ( or drop it ) to those who thought the waste could be pushed in too far

 

[ree]

Hugh Jaleak,

So, you are claiming to be a drain cleaner? A drain cleaner who, instead of dealing with the subject at hand, roams about out of context (you are doing it again only this time you have no excuse for "not realising")) and keeps going off page.

You say that you've been doing this "for many years". Then you've been doing the job wrong for many years if your idea of a competent drain cleaner is to release sewage into peoples back yards - and its not "spillage or effluent" (more euphemism) we are talking about, its sewage released by yourself.

Your bewildering claims that:
1. the sewage can be "swept up" - up to where, what are you going to do with this sewage that you've "swept up"?
2. "the water will soak away" - how will it soak away on a hard surface yard?
3. It will "dry up" - if its raining?
4. How can you wash the yard down if there's no available gulley? Or doesn't adding more water matter because it will eventually dry up? At this stage you've turned somebody's backyard into a sewage pond. Just saying.

Now a tanker is introduced. Are you having a laugh - suggesting that the average drain cleaner or plumber has a tanker on call: "if its available"? And how would an available tanker access typical narrow or gated back entryways?

And you now are out of context again - we are talking about what you do prior to digging. Perhaps you "didn't realise" that either?

"the etiquette of cleaning and unblocking drains" - Please explain what you mean by this? Are you off with the euphemisms again? Etiquette?

 

[Hugh Jaleak]

I am not 'claiming' anything. I am speaking from experience, but as clearly your knowledge on the matter is far greater than mine, and as I have obviously been doing the job wrongly, I will bow to your superiority and gracefully retire from commenting further. The OP has sorted out his issue, and arguing serves no purpose other than to clutter up the thread.

 

[ree]

"I am not 'claiming' anything" is actually a claim.
"I am speaking from experience" is also a claim.
In your above post you make perhaps seven or eight claims.

"bow to your ... " & "gracefully retire" are pretty shopworn cliches like other stale cliches that you've used above. Why the attempts to gentrify and euphemise your posts?

You are far from "gracefully retiring" - you are legging it because you cannot defend the positions you have taken.

If "arguing serves no purpose other than clutter up the thread" then how do you account for your previous posts? Very little thought there for the thread until you were on the hot seat.

 

[Madrab]

Not wishing to stomp over your post Spiffy so apologies for this...but...

Ree,

In the UK, it would be rare for a plumber to extend past the usual attempts of clearing wastes with rods.

If the normal rodding procedures did not clear it, as hugh pointed out quite clearly, it would then be handed off to a professional drain cleaning company/council sewage specialists to clear the drains/gullies. This would not be the realm of the normal plumber, as you point out, he does not have access to the required specialist equipment.
The specialists would have access to all the high pressure cleaning and suction equipment required to handle the job. It is typical in the UK to use a high pressure hose down a gulley/drain to clear blockages, this can sometimes end up with fluid spilling over the man hole, this is subsequently cleaned up and hosed down once the blockage has been cleared.

This is normal practice within the UK - take it or leave it

 

[Norcon]

We blew high pressure nitrogen down a drain once inside a supermarket at the request of the owner.
Not sewerage but food cabinet fridge drain.

About 20 feet away this grey gunge blew up into the shop at another outlet and we had to vacate the premises due to the stink.
The staff spent half the night clearing it up.

 

[ree]

Madrab,

Your final remark: "take it or leave it" what do you mean?