It started out like any other one AM feeding. I rolled over groggily as my wife entered the room from getting water from the kitchen.
Only the words coming out of her mouth didn't sound right.
"Pardon?" I asked. Only in my half awake state it sounded like, "Hrrrngh"?
"The kitchen sink is full of water and it's backing up. It smells bad. "
"Fngn shng." I replied.
I dragged my as out of bed to assess the situation. As my wife had noted, the kitchen sinks were indeed full of water and in danger of overflowing. Stuff was floating in the water and it didn't smell too pretty, although not as bad as sewage. (As evidenced by the fact that I failed to add last night's supper to the mess already in the sink.) I grabbed a pot and scooped up some water.
The water went into the bathroom sink, which proceeded to drain. Slowly. However, that indicated to me that I wasn't dealing with a back up at the street level. I dumped a few more pots of water into the toilet and went downstairs.
The lack of a foot of shitty water in the basement, or even any backed up drains, confirmed that I was dealing with a localized clog rather than a Poopocalypse. Indeed, it was only the kitchen drain that was plugged, and it's happened before. However, last time, the drain didn't back up on its own.
I was puzzled until I heard the water softener make noise. I glanced over and discovered that it was in the middle of a regeneration cycle. Since it shares the same drain as the kitchen, the clog was causing the drain water from the softener to back upstairs. However, I still wasn't awake enough to remember how to stop the softener from draining onto my kitchen floor, so I hurriedly shut off the house water supply.
Returning to the kitchen, I discovered that my lethargy had cost me. The kitchen sink had overflowed onto the floor. Out came the towels to soak up the thankfully small mess.
The last time this happened, I ran a snake down the drain until I punched through the wad of grease and coffee grounds that had blocked it. I set about to do the same this time, only I had a problem. The clean out port is at the bottom of the drain pipe. A pipe which is currently full of water. And which has a sink full of water on top of it. And since drain pipes aren't designed to hold standing water under pressure, a small puddle was already forming on the floor of the basement. I went back upstairs to bail out the kitchen sink.
Once the sink was empty, the water left in the pipe would fit into a five gallon pail. So I opened the clean out cap and managed to get most of the water into the pail.
Now for the fun part. I started with my fifteen foot sink snake. It reached the clog but couldn't open it; the snake's little head just wasn't up to busting up a mass of coffee flavored grease two inches across. Go figure.
So it was time to bring out his big brother. He's fifty or a hundred feet long, and the head is like three times the size. Problem is, using it is like wrestling a Python. A skinny, greasy, rusty, smelly Python. It doesn't have a convenient container like the little snake, so it's just awkward. However, since it's three in the morning and I don't have running water in my house, it would have to do.
I sent the snake down the pipe and bulled through what resistance I encountered. As I was working it into the drain, I was awake enough to start thinking of ways to store it other than simply leaving a big greasy coil of spring sort of wound up on the floor to get in the way. Then I saw the five gallon pail. By my estimate, the snake would coil up into the pail.
In theory. In practice, I got about three turns in before the thing unwound and jumped out of the pail. Version 2.0 involved sacrificing the lid of the pail. I cut a small hole in the center, just big enough to admit the snake, and attached it to the pail.
This time, the snake stayed in the pail while I pulled it back out of the drain. And when it was clear, I ran a couple buckets of water into the clean out. It didn't back up, so I declared my repair a temporary success. (I still had to clear the pipes, but that will take the use of chemicals I don't have. In the meantime, the drain should work until I can clean it properly.)
So I took off my plumber's hat for my janitor's cap, cleaned up the mess in the basement and the kitchen, and went back to bed for a couple hours.
