Well, poop

About a week ago one of our toilets stopped flushing and wouldn’t unclog via normal means (plunger, auger). Then we realized both toilets were blocked. Then I checked and found other drains weren’t draining properly. The main sewer line was blocked. Obviously this all happened around 6pm, so we had to pay extra to get someone to drive over and augur the main line.

When he arrived, he asked where the cleanout access point was, and described a white plastic circular cover with a square protruding in the center, like a reverse Robertson screw head.

Ah yes, I said, I remember seeing one of those outside the house, it’s somewhere under all the snow. I couldn’t remember where, but I did at least have a snow shovel. He made some good guesses and dug about a bit, and fortunately managed to find it — happily it wasn’t at the side of the house under the waist-deep snowdrift. (If he hadn’t found it he’d have had to remove a toilet to get to the sewer line, then put the toilet back again afterwards.)

The pipe was snaked and we were back in action. Then about a day later it blocked again. He sent someone out, this time with a borescope. It turned out that with the ground melting and freezing, the main sewer line had become misaligned from the E/One grinder pump, and there was now a kind of ledge up from the pipe into the grinder. This meant that any solids would hit the ledge and not flow in, they’d back up into the pipe, and before long it would block again.

At least we now knew what the problem was. Unfortunately, sewer lines here are buried about 2m deep, because that’s how far down the ground freezes in winter. So we contacted the builder, and he started arranging for an excavator and work crew. In the meantime, we had a defecation situation, so for about a week we made trips to Target or Walgreens every day to drop the kids off at the pool.

Finally the great day came. The builders dug all the way down to the sewer, climbed down a ladder, replaced the pipe, and buried it all again. The landscaping will need to be redone, right now it’s a mess of mud and partially melted snow. Right now, though, we’re having an April blizzard. Some time in May it should have warmed up enough for the cable company to come out and re-bury their cables, two of which have been severed. Once that’s done, grass can be put down again.

As Brian Aldiss once wrote, “Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.” You don’t realize what a luxury it is to have a toilet in your own home until you suddenly don’t have one.