The Three Rules of Plumbing
- Sh!t flows downhill
- Never chew your fingernails
- Payday’s on Friday
Mark’s Dirty Movie
Earlier this week, we got some bad news. Following advice from the city inspector, we hired a local plumbing company to TV camera our interior sewer line. The owner lives on our street. The inspector had TV camera the exterior portion of the sewer line and the only bad thing he had found was that Roto-Rooter had not done a very good job, when they had cleaned out the main line last month. This observation only served to foster false hope. The new plumber found several large holes in the cast iron, beneath our basement.
They are formulating a bid and we’ll seek others too, but the long and the short of it is that we’ll soon be throwing a whole lot of money down the drain, literally. Our house is seventy-five years old and so are the pipes below it. We’ve wrestled with them over the years, but now it is time to send them to the bench and bring in some relief. How did that baseball metaphor sneak in here? Work could commence as early as a week from tomorrow. Starting on a Monday, it will be done by Friday, with only a brief interruption in service. We were promised a lot of smell though. I hope that it will be warm enough to open the windows. In the picture and the movie, upper right is down and lower left is up. Don’t forget to say hello to the spider in the video. The three rules will never be more true than here.
So, it sounds like they are suggesting a dig up rather than a slip line. Did they say why?
Ashlan and Rey spent many hours watching less interesting sewer tapes. But they were making money, not spending.
Jay, what is a “slip line”? Is it where a plastic pipe is fed thru the existing cast iron to take on the old pipe’s duties?
Marquis & Pooh – thanks for posting the video! interesting how clearly the holes & cracks show up… what does this camera look like (how big, how is it protected from the water/yuckies, etc.)? And, I missed the spider 🙁
Karen, you are correct. The camera looks like a flashlight and it is mounted on a stiff cable. It is a sealed unit. Jay, I asked this plumber about lining and they said that it would likely be more expensive than digging. They probably don’t know how to do it anyway. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I need to get another bid or two spun-up this week.