Need Solution For Clogged Sink

Having a septic tank is a little different. With city sewer systems, you have to unmount the toilet from the floor, snake from there, then reinstall the toilet. Having a clean out installed along the line might help avoid this.

With a septic tank you dig down and pop off the lid. Then you have access to the open end of the drain and snake it from there, hoping you don't slip into the Pismal Swamp.

I did make a rig that I've not yet had to use. In consists of a 1" pvc pipe with a 45° elbow on the end. You set the pipe down in the toilet and guide the snake through it, following the bends through the toilet and into the sewer line. The pvc pipe protects the toilet from getting scratched by the metal snake. Depending on the size of the head of the snake, you will probably have to unroll it and feed the backwards through the pvc pipe.

 

I was shocked.

-Charmin just sat in the jar like a lump of sticky papier-mâché. It never dissolved.
-Cottenelle did not completely dissolve, but it broke down sufficiently.
-Scott Ultra Soft rapidly broke down like flakes in a snow globe.

What sucks is that Walmart stopped carrying that flavor of Scott. They sell plenty of Charmin. It's rather frightening.

My house up north that was built in the 40s had orangeburg pipes (made of fiber.) I swear the sewer line had decayed and floated away, and everything was flowing through the tunnel left behind in the clay. I used to have real issues with it. Every time a plumber snaked it, the snake came back with hunks of fiber pipe on it. In hindsight, I bet the Charmin is what screwed things up.

 

Bespeckled drug store worker with a fetish for hiney hygiene?

 

You watch Grit TV. When you see the wagon trains or the men on extended horseback rides, don't you ever wonder? What a miserable way to live.

There are some in my county who take sterilized human waste from out-of-state and spread it on their fields. They get paid to do this. This was done to us by local politicians who cared not for the optics (or the smell) when money is on the table.

 

@Jayce Gray How's it going? You're not stuck under the house while the rest of us are up here flapping our gums about all things septic, great & small, are you?

 

I live in a house that was built in 1910 and includes some clay pipes between the foundation of my house and the place where it connects to the city sewer. Shortly after we bought the house 23 years ago, we began having plumbing problems. The first plumber we called found a towel in the sewer pipe, which had apparently been used to allow for the use of a clean-out cover that didn't fit. That fixed the problem for a while.

Another plumber sent a camera into the sewer pipes and told us that the lines from the house to the town connection would have to be replaced. However, since the town sewer system is in the middle of the street, and our street is also a state route and the main route to the hospital, we would not only have to dig up our front lawn and half the street, but we'd have to hire flagmen and pay to have the street repaved after it was done, at a price of several thousands of dollars.

We don't have that kind of money so we're working at making do with what we have. Although this plumber probably thought we had more money than we were willing to spend, offering no alternatives, we later got another plumber to come out. He hooked up a drain-cleaning bladder to our main sewer line that connects to a water hose. It uses pulsating water pressure to push things along. He said that he couldn't allow it to run more than a certain number of hours, which I don't recall right now, and it didn't clear within that time. Nevertheless, it did allow our drains to drain and our toilets to flush for another several months.

Then we had the same problem, so I bought my own drain-cleaning bladder and let it run for three times the duration the plumber was willing to let it run, and there was a point where the pulsations stopped, and I could hear water running through the pipes. At that point, I knew that either the drain had been cleared or it had broken. Fortunately, it seemed to have been cleared.

Everything was fine for a couple of years. Meanwhile, we decided to be very careful of what we flushed down the toilet. Just because a baby wipe says that it's flushable doesn't mean that it's good to go.

We've had no major problems with our sewer system since but the sinks are sometimes slow to drain, and occasionally worse than slow to drain. Neither Drano nor Liquid Plumber seems to help much. What seems to help a lot is a product called Green Gobbler, which is available on Amazon, only it's not intended to be a quick fix. What we do is wait until we're all packed up and ready to go somewhere for a few days or a week, such as to a timeshare, and then pour a couple of large bottles of this stuff down our drains just before we leave, adding just a small amount of water to distribute it. When we come back, we're good to go for a long time.

I think that whether this stuff will work or not depends on what the clog is. If it's a biological clog, like hair, soap, toilet paper, and even the supposedly flushable wipes, it will disintegrate them. It might be that we have an obstruction along the way that this stuff won't disintegrate, but it gets rid of everything that has backed up at that point, so our drains will work.

I'm nearly 72 and have already had cancer twice, and my wife will probably move from here if I die before she does, so it doesn't have to work forever.