In September, my sewage drain backed up into my basement. That was a nice little surprise one morning. Luckily, there wasn’t much water damage since the room with the sewer drains is off to the side.

My first course of action was to vacuum up as much of the water with my Shop Vac and dump it outside. Then it was off to Lowe’s to see what they had. After looking around, I ended up with a pipe snake with a tipped end.

It cost me about $25 and can uncoil to 40 feet. This particular model has an enclosed casing, so you can hold it while turning to unwind and retract it. Good if you don’t want to get your hands dirty, I guess. That is kind of impossible with these type of problems though.

Anyway, I shoved it down the pipe and kept feeding it in until something stopped it. I assumed it was the clog and simply just shoved it back and forth, hoping the tip of the snake would poke through whatever it was. After a few minutes something “gave” and I noticed some of the standing water in my drain started to go down. Success! To be on the safe side, I went ahead and rammed it a few more times since I figured it was roots. There is a tree outside and I found an old empty box of “root remover” shortly after moving in. So it must have been a problem before.

I retracted the snake after it felt like there was nothing else resisting it and rinsed it off with a hose as it came out. After winding it back up, I then dumped some rock salt down the drain. Rock Salt, which you can get as basic snow salt, apparently kills roots. And is a hell of a lot cheaper than the little box of “sewer drain crystals” that you can pick up at any decent home store for about $15 a box. You can get an entire bag of rock salt for under $2!

Of course it may be hard to find if it’s not winter time, or you’re in a warm climate all year round and don’t need to de-ice your sidewalks. But yeah, ordinary rock salt. If you have some sitting around, dump it down the drain or flush it down the toilet a few times a year to control roots. The guy at Lowe’s thinks regular table salt would work as well.

It’s been a couple months and there hasn’t been any problems with the drain. Winter is coming around so I plan on getting an extra bag of rock salt to keep in the basement next to the drain.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Interior, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.