Plumbing

Our plumbing is FUBAR.

Had the plumber out this morning to install a garbage disposal “and some other odds & ends.” He just left me a quote for $3,500 worth of work. I wasn’t emotionally or financially prepared to write that kind of a check today. The disposal isn’t even installed. Not worth it, since we’ll be re-piping that entire side of the house anyway. All I need to decide is when to get this work done, and who to do. The web tends to back up the facts this quy was quoting at me.

Let’s see if I can summarize:

We’ll start with the toilet in the master bedroom which flushes REALLY SLOWLY. Like, “depress handle, and count to 20, slowly. That toilet drains into a 2″ diameter pipe. Toilets are supposed to have a 4” drain for the “main soil” pipe. From a home improvement site: “if you want a lifetime of toilet troubles, usually after every flush, connect a toilet to that 2″ drain pipe.” Woot.

As we follow the 2″ pipe, we pick up the master shower (suggested diameter drain 3″) and the sink (who cares). The plumber told me an amusing and compelling reason why the shower drain is overengineered. “There’s no space for it to back up except right onto the floor.” Woot.

That 2″ pipe runs through the crawl space under the master bedroom, through a hole that was chipped in the foundation, through the crawl space under the kitchen. At that point it connects to the drain from the kitchen sink (where we were planning to splice in the garbage disposal), and out across the ceiling of the basement (loosely suspended by plastic straps). There is a parallel 2″ pipe from the dishwasher in the same straps. These two cruise past the water heater on their way across the basement. Apparently this is bad because your poop dries out from the heat and clogs the pipe. Double woot for the dried poop.

Once we make it across the ceiling of the basement (still in the same 2″ pipe), we join up with 1.5″ pipe from the washing machine, 2″ from the other shower and 1.5″ from the other sink. That one monstrously overloaded 2″ pipe then comes into the egress pipe for the house at a “T” instead of a “Y,” which “encourages blockage. The other toilet has a 4″ drain which is properly connected to the primary egress.

Oh yeah and there’s corrosion and a small leak at the main egress. Woot, I say. Woot.

To fix all this, he suggests capping off the existing 2” pipe at the washing machine, before the long traversal across the basement ceiling. That will make the East side of the house “correct,” and totally disconnect the kitchen and the master bathroom. We would then run 3 or 4″ pipe across the other side of the basement (away from the water heater) and along inside the basement (instead of the crawl space) and replace all the connections along the way.

Oh yeah, and we also need to get power to the garbage disposal somehow. That sort of got lost in the noise.

On the list for today:

(1) Call another plumber for a second estimate on this fustercluck.
(2) Call the people who did our home inspection and ask how they missed things like corroded and leaking main drains and a full 2″ of missing diameter on our master bathroom “soil” pipe. According to the inspection, their liability is limited to $2,000.
(3) Weep softly for my checking account.
(4) Think deeply if there are other things I want done while I’ve got a dude in the crawl space.