Getting to the root of our plumbing problems

Today, the plumber came to replace our water heater. This was a replacement for the water heater that we just had put in last September; the previous unit was defective. Now we have a brand new hot water heater, and hopefully it will be many years before we have to complain of a cold shower.

In order to install the new hot water heater, the old one had to be removed. In order to remove the old hot water heater, it had to be drained of its contents. While this was a simple task during the previous installation, not so this time. Why, you ask?

Dear reader, do you remember the previous post wherein I confessed to my deep and abiding fear of our plumbing? Well, it turns out, my worrying was (somewhat) justified by the actual facts of the case. Our whole house drain was clogged. That terrible glug glug glug that we heard was not in any way related to the venting of air through our pipes. It was all about the draining -- or rather, lack thereof -- of water (and all the other stuff that goes along with the water down the drain). By the time the plumber came, the situation was grim: water had backed up into the basement drains. While it seemed from upstairs that things were draining, in fact, they were just going down as far as our basement, where they were unable to pass to the city sewer line.

Thankfully, we had a professional here, and that professional had access to a heavy-duty piece of machinery capable of snaking a 4-inch pipe through the basement cleanout all the way under the street and to the hook-up, something like 75 feet. The good news is, the drain is now running clear. The bad news is that what was clogging the pipe was roots. Big, ugly, living, growing roots, which had gone so far as to become a home to actual living things (at least one earthworm). This is bad news. It means the sewer pipe has cracks in it that allow things to grow into it. Clearly: bad.

The formal solution to this problem is to replace the sewer pipe with a new one. However, this would involve an amount of work that we simply could not possibly do (and no one would actually really recommend that we do). We're talking serious excavation, all the way out to the street, to the point of needing to hire a police detail while we dig up and then re-pave the street. Seriously. Not going to happen.

So tonight we're going to pour some crazy concoction down the drain. This product (given to us by the plumber) is some sort of herbicide this is going to foam up through the pipes and (it is hoped) kill the roots that are choking our pipes. This is the best we can do.

Update: Apparently, we are not pouring Root-X down the drain tonight. After reading Root-X's website, we discovered that we should have done it within the hour after the roots were cut out of the drain; now we have to wait 6 to 8 weeks to do it. Here is the explanation from Root-X:

It’s important to apply RootX within the first hour after cutting or wait six to eight weeks. That’s because roots release a traumatic acid to cover the cut ends and protect them against further injury. If you apply RootX immediately after cutting, the herbicide can penetrate the root ends before the traumatic acid coating is complete. After six to eight weeks, the traumatic acid will have dissipated, leaving the most vulnerable part of the root—the white tender meristem growth where cells are actively dividing—exposed to the herbicide. The more root tissue you can treat with RootX, the better.

Traumatic acid? Yikes. So I guess you all know what we're doing in 6 to 8 weeks. And if you said "looking to buy a different house, perhaps one without plumbing," you're right.

OK, not really.

Need I tell you again, people: Respect the Drain. Seriously.