Sewer pipe

Over the years we’ve been living in our house, our sewage line has been blocked maybe three times.  The symptoms weren’t as gross as they could have been, probably because the sewer line exits the house at the basement slab level, and we have no plumbing in the basement.  That means we’ve got a good 10′ of gravity to protect us.  Instead, the symptoms have been either in the form of water bubbling out of the cleanout lid, or water condensate overflowing from the HVAC condensate drain line.  See, some smart cookie decided that the condensate should tie into the sewer cleanout.  So when I said we had no plumbing in the basement, I meant real plumbing.  The weak link in the sewer chain was a 3/4″ pipe that would clog when the sewer line backed up, causing the water condensate to back up in our garage.

These two symptoms started exhibiting last Saturday, and when I opened up the cleanout, sure enough we were backed up.  So I hauled out my trusty 50′ pipe snake and started to try and unclog the line.  Unfortunately, about 48′ in I hit an obstruction that wouldn’t clear.  That pretty much left my only option to be to call a plumber.

I was a little surprised to get someone who could come out on a Saturday on quick notice, but Kenny from Metro Septic came out in the afternoon to pump my septic tank.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I thought I was on septic.  See, the other times plumbers came out to unclog my line, they told me I wasn’t on sewer.  I had thought I was on sewer, though, because Cobb County was charging me sewer fees, and had been since I moved in in 2000.  So I naturally contacted the county to get them to stop billing, which they did after I visited a county office that had plans for our street that clearly showed that neither my house, nor any of my near neighbors, were on sewer.  Not only did they stop billing me, they credited me back to when I bought the house.  So I’m on septic, right?

Well, when Kenny showed up and started looking for my septic tank with a nifty fiberglass probe and a metal detector, he couldn’t find anything.  He must have poked 100 holes looking for the thing.  When it became clear that we weren’t going to find it that way, he rolled his mini backhoe into the yard and started digging.  He started at the cleanout and followed the pipe that I had snaked out to 48′.  But when he got to that point, what we found wasn’t a septic tank, or even a drain field.  No, it was a collapsed pipe.  And judging by the black dirt all around it, the pipe appeared to have been broken for years.  So he kept digging.  Another 20′ on he found another section of broken pipe that had sunk about 2′, but it didn’t look like anything had passed that way for many years:  the pipe was clean.

At this point he was pretty sure we weren’t on septic, because we were getting far enough down the hill of my backyard that there was nowhere for the drain field to be, but it was getting dark, so he promised to come back first thing Monday.

When he returned, he only dug another 10′ or so just to pick up the other side of the broken pipe.  He had brought with him a nifty camera this time, so he snaked it down the pipe to see where it went.  As expected, it didn’t end up in a septic tank.  No, apparently my sewer line goes about 15′ into my neighbor’s yard, ties in with theirs, and we both share a tap into the sewer main.  The main appears to run across the very bottom of our yards.

Kenny dug another trench parallel to the one following the damaged pipe, tied in to the existing good pipe on either end, and buried the whole thing again.  He didn’t want to put the new pipe in the same trench, fearing it would collapse like the old one did.  He even installed another cleanout for me further down, which I’ve looked into in order to see our newly functional sewer drain in operation.

It wasn’t cheap, but obviously wasn’t optional, either.  And the mystery of the clogging septic tank is

solved.  I just have to wonder how it was possible for our sewer system to consist of 48′ of pipe ending 4′ underground.  No tank, no drain field, nothing.  There are only two of us, and we don’t produce much waste.  And 4′ deep is probably deep enough in this Georgia clay to keep stuff from percolating up into the yard.  I would think the thing would have been backed up all the time.

If you live in Atlanta and need someone to work on your septic or sewer system, I would recommend Kenny and Metro Septic highly.  He did a good job, he communicated well, and his rates are reasonable.  He’s a nice guy, too.