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" Last Friday night my husband opened the basement door and heard the dreaded sound of running water splashing on the floor. The main drain line from the house that leads to the sewer was backed up and coming out from the washing machine drain. There was water everywhere and since I had just given our son a bath, the water wasn&amp;#039;t going to be stopping anytime soon. I called Roto Rooter which promised to get a serviceperson to us within the hour. In the meantime, we tried collected water in 5-gallon buckets and dumped it in the backyard. Of all the trials I&amp;#039;ve experienced during construction projects (crawling into eaves with 50-year old insulation, being covered in paint from painting ceiling, breathing in fumes from glue as I removed linoleum) this had to be the WORST of all. When the Roto Rooter plumber showed up he had to chisel open the service caps on a cast iron U-trap (see picture to the right) because it had been serviced once before and the plugs had been pounded in way too far. When he finally pried it open there was over 50 years of gunk and debris to remove. The thing that really annoys me is that when we moved in and renovated the house we replaced 95% of the piping with PVC as nothing sticks to PVC so you can&amp;#039;t get clogs. The 5% that we didn&amp;#039;t replace consisted of this cast iron U-trap. If only we had replaced the u-trap, the whole disaster could have been avoided. Now that the pipe is cleared, the basement scrubbed with bleach and all is well, what do we do to prevent this from happening again? Every few years we&amp;#039;ll be opening up the U-trap and doing a preventative cleaning or calling in a professional plumber to do it for us. We&amp;#039;re also considering installing a water sensor in the basement. Water sensors work by either sounding an alarm, shutting off water to the house on the main line, or calling to to let you know there&amp;#039;s a problem. While a sensor wouldn&amp;#039;t have prevented the problem, it could have minimized the damage.  Come back for a report on the next stage of our basement renovation. If you missed the beginning stages, check out my earlier blog posts. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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