Deluge clogged your drains? Plumber shares his good cheap secrets
Above: Fashion-forward footwear this week, especially at Brew World Headquarters, where the basement this morning was a lake.
This morning when your Brewer-in-chief should have been probing the city for news, she was instead standing in ankle-deep water, lamely poking a chopstick down a clogged basement-floor drain.
Like much of the Mid-Atlantic, Baltimore has been super-saturated following three days of nearly-non-stop rain – half of which, it seems, has wound up in the basement of Brew World Headquarters.
We’ll pick back up with the news tomorrow and presume that by now you know the grim weather details – a near-record 6.8 inches of rain recorded at BWI since Monday morning, the fact that the 30-year average for the entire month of September is only 4.03 inches, Ellicott City and Port Deposit seem to be washing away.
First, we’re going to relate the soggy saga, worth reading all the way through because there’s a practical payoff at the end. You may need it: this rain is supposed to continue until Saturday.
The saga
During even the worst rainstorms, there’s usually only a small trickle in our basement, leading to the drain. This morning, due to sagging leaf-clogged gutters and days of monsoon-like rain, water was spilling sideways, soaking one side of the foundation. Last night it penetrated the basement walls, oozed inside and formed a lake.
Something was clogging the drain.
The rain-swollen Jones Falls, in Mt. Washington.
An outside basement stairwell was also turning into a water trap, sending more H2O sloshing into the basement via the sodden door jamb. Despite a couple of sweepings and cleanings of the steps, it seems that leaves and dirt had washed down and formed a mucky goo, clogging that drain, as well. It was an urgent situation, made extra urgent by what was happening now that the cat couldn’t reach her litter-box on the other side of the lake. (Clean-up in aisle 7!”) Yuk.
Enter Brian, the plumber, who always promises to tell me “something they don’t teach them college boys.” He’s sort of like Yoda, if Yoda came from Dundalk. Here are the three devices Brian employed – which, if I’d only known about them, I could have used to solve the problem myself and saved a heck of a lot of money. (I don’t know how much yet, we haven’t gotten the bill.)
The plunger
This was – duhh – simple. Brian just took a plunger (not one of those wimpy shallow little orange ones, but a biggie) and plunged right through the standing water. (Why didn’t I think of that? I have a plunger!) It loosened things up, caused a slight swirl.
The Drain King
Next came a little tool Brian had in his truck. This is a device you screw onto the end of your garden hose and poke down into the bad drain. It’s got a rubber bladder that inflates and a teeny little hole on the tip for the water to come out of. When you turn on the hose, the rubber part inflates, filling the drain and making a tight seal. Then the water comes blasting out, narrow as a laser, mighty as a fire hose.
Drain King fits on the end of your hose.
Brian sipped his coffee while we waited for the ND to do its job. (ND? “That’s what an old plumber called it when he showed it to me,” he said. “I don’t want to say what it stands for, it’s not very nice.”) “Tell me something good, Miss Fern.”
Well, I went to the Grand Prix, I said. “Oh that thing where they go and watch cars go around in a circle? Ehh. Me, I like to hunt and fish,” he said, recounting how he did over the weekend with White Perch (great) and crabs (terrible.) He mostly throws everything back.
The Drain King when water is blasting through it.
After about five minutes we yanked the hose out and – Swirling Dervishes! – the water began powering down the drain in a little watery cyclone. In about 15 minutes the lake was gone. He did the same plunger/super-concentrated-hose-squirt sequence for the stairwell drain and, voila! Gone. I went later to Falkenhan’s in Hampden and bought myself one (with a more straightforward name, “the Drain King,”) for $14.99.
The Galvanized Hardware Cloth
This comes under the heading of prevention, not cure, but that’s usually what you get toward the end of a Brian visit, (along with his standard mantra “Whatever you do, don’t fall in love with old plumbing.”)
Hardware cloth is not cloth, but a big-gauge wire mesh that comes in rolls. You can put a large piece over the drain at the bottom of your basement steps and it will keep the leaves up and out of there. (See photos.)
“Just a few leaves and your drain is blocked,” Brian said. “You’re through.”
Brian recommended I have the hardware store cut a piece to fit and prevent further clogging out there. Falkenhan’s had this stuff too, $1.10 a foot.
“But with the hardware cloth,” he explained, “you gotta have a lot of leaves before there’s a problem.”
The Farewell
Brian delivered a little more advice on the way out, mostly about the gutters. (“Last thing you need, do you have a raincoat and umbrella? Go out when it’s raining hard and look around.”) We still have to figure out why the water isn’t draining away from the house better. In the meantime, armed with a few low-tech tools of Brian’s trade, I felt better able to face the new post-deluvian world we seem to be living in. Now all I need are some gills.
Hardware cloth in place – spiffy!