Well thank you. I switched from a manual one to the powered one. and it was a quick learning experience with no Youtube at the time and a little common sense.
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.
I could just see myself being born in the olden days of England,. I would have been what they called a gong farmer. !!! https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-toilet
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.
I was doing a lot of trail riding in the early 70s and belonged to a club. All of our rides were about 18 miles which is quite a stretch even with modern roads. Now about that being miserable I would think that those early wagon trains had an outhouse wagon pulled along with the rest of the wagons. I know we had one that was rubber tired of course but believe me drinking beer and wine all day you were glad you could just ride up to the wagon even while it was moving and tie off your horse to go have a few minutes of rest. We also had a cold beer wagon you could ride up to and grab a beer on the run. I sure miss those days so long ago it was super fun.
@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?
That sounds like a good way to spread hepatitis C. In California about 25 years ago they had a lot of children in school with Hep C and the Feds got right on it and found that fresh strawberries from Mexico were being served in the school cafeteria. Further investigation showed that the strawberries had human excrement contamination, or in other words someone crapped on the strawberries
I will see if I can find the article I recently seen in TV, about using carb soda and vinegar , it’s supposed to cause more problems …..but is it for real or is it plumber’s looking for more work ?? @Krystal Shay
I couldn’t find the TV article . I have to say I’ve used the vinegar / carb soda solution just to get rid of the once in a while smelly drain ( we are on a septic system ) so get a very rare smelly drain . We are connected to a waste water recycling system so we don’t have any over flow pits as part of septic system ,the waste water gets recycled to use on the big Greg Norman golf course near us copied this from here https://www.tubshroom.com/blogs/tips/vinegar-baking-soda-solution The reason why you shouldn't be using the vinegar and baking soda solution to clean out your drain is that the baking soda and vinegar mixture can cause a chemical reaction that is harmful to certain materials in your drain. When you are using baking soda and vinegar, you are actually causing the material in your drain to corrode. This will cause the drain to break down even more. When you are using a baking soda and vinegar solution to clean out your drain, you are actually causing the rubber and plastic that are used for the drain's pipes to be eaten away by the mixture. Over time, this rubber and plastic will break down, causing the drain to become even more blocked.
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.
It sounds like you have lost the needed drop angle to allow the line to evacuate. If it can't flow even without a blockage the ground has probably settled quite a lot since the plumbing was installed. It would capture any solid waste where ever the drop starts and ends and would explain why it took those few months to get backed up again. You should read the history of the Roman hot water ducts built at Pompeii and other places. It was a trough all built high up and ran a slight pitch that allowed the water to flow all throughout the city, it was hot water that supplied those hot baths in all the homes. Most of the system is still standing and was quite a feat to be so long ago. That volcano must have been a really terrible one to bury all and everything so quick. People dropped in their tracks to cover their faces and they are there for eternity.
I sometimes use a closet auger on a toilet if things are clogged. A regular snake won't really work, but closet augers are designed to put the "snake" into the trap behind the toilet drain. I have had to unclog the line to the septic tank once, and I rented a power to do that job. This is what a closet auger looks like if you haven't seen one.