Blackness from beneath

I’m writing this post after the fact. About a few months ago my rental house had a drain backup that affected some showers and toilets. I had a plumber go by the house and take a look. Of course these things seem to always happen after hours. The plumber told me that he couldn’t replicate the issue and that sometimes these things happen in these old neighborhoods. I basically paid for a guy to drive to my property on a weekend and tell me there wasn’t a problem. Well, the problem reared its head again big time on the weekend of April 4th. We had some major storms systems roll through that produced a ton of rain. During all that the drains started backing up again and spilling onto the floors in the bathrooms. I called a different plumber this time to come out and fix the problem. He was finally able to get out to the house on Sunday after the rain stopped but he couldn’t find a clean out. Thinking there was no clean out we hatched a plan to remove one of the affected toilets and snake the line. He planned to add a clean out somewhere in the yard by digging up the drain line and splicing in an access port. He would do this work on Wednesday.

Wednesday day came and the plumber gave me some good news. He was able to find the clean out access in the back yard so no need to do the digging and spicing. That really saved me some money. Problem solved, or so I thought. That same night my daughter heard the toilet making the glugging sound while showering and immediately stopped the water. Our problem wasn’t solved. It took an additional trip from the plumber to snake the line again with a bigger head. To make sure we got the clog I had the plumber run the showers and dump the washer and toilets for a good 15 minutes. So far so good. All in it cost me about $800 to resolve the drain problem. I’m not sure if there is some preventative maintenance that I should be doing but maybe I’ll check into that.