Day: March 6, 2015

Some jobs you just have to grit your teeth and do whether you like it or not, and this was one of them. Regular readers of My Trike may recall that while I was building my wood store, I inadvertently put a pick-axe through the waste pipe that takes water from my kitchen sink and joins up with the one connected to my bath and bathroom handbasin.

It didn’t take much at the time to repair it but shortly afterwards I began to notice that I was having problems with both my kitchen and bathroom wastes which were emptying much more slowly than previously and with lots of glugging noises as trapped air was being released. My big fear was that there was another break in the plastic pipe that I’d missed and that waste water was being released into the ground under the concrete floor of the wood store and as there was no practical way of checking if this was so, I’d more or less become resigned to the fact that I’d have to put in a new waste system and block the old pipe up. In the meantime I’ve had to limit the amount of waste water that I put down it which, I confess, has even had to include limiting the number and duration of the showers that I’ve allowed myself.

This would be a job involving quite a lot of work that would mean removing some of the kitchen units that I put in only a fairly short time ago and also ripping out my old bathroom, mainly because I plan to replace it anyway and it wouldn’t be worthwhile working around putting in just a new waste without doing the whole job. Obviously I’d prefer to do all this at a time of my own choosing so you can imagine how I felt when things came to a head a couple of days ago. I decided to do some much overdue washing and when the machine pumped out, the dirty water ended up in my bath with hardly any of it finding its way into the by-now almost totally blocked waste pipe.

My efforts with the sink plunger yielded almost no results so I had to empty my bath with a plastic container and face the fact that no more water could go into the existing waste pipe. And like it or not, I had to get stuck in immediately and install a new one. Later that evening I was telling Wim about my problems over a couple of glasses of wine and he happened to mention that he had a Drain Snake, one of those coil-type things with a hook on the end that you shove up drains to clear anything out that is blocking them. I said that I doubted it would do any good but that I’d borrow it anyway and give it a try before starting all of the work that I envisaged was ahead of me.

My house, like many in the UK and the great majority in rural France, relies on a ‘fosse septique’, or septic tank, to handle all of its waste water. Strict rules have been in force since 1992, I think, about how the system should be designed and installed and whenever a house is sold the ‘fosse septique’ is included in the pre-sale inspection that is documented and passed to the prospective purchaser. There are rules on how the ‘grey’ (from sinks etc) and ‘black’ (from WCs) water must not be mixed and how each should be treated and disposed of separately and as many old rural houses just had pipes emptying straight into nearby rivers, the inspectors have had a lot of work to do to rectify problems, many of which have been quite serious.

The inspection that was carried out on my house revealed that its ‘fosse septique’ system was not of an approved design. The waste water from the kitchen and bathroom originally just fed straight into the ‘fosse septique’, meaning that the grey and black water was not separated. A grease trap had been installed in the ground that intercepted the water from the kitchen and bathroom before it entered the ‘fosse septique’ and someone had tried to deal with the problem by diverting the flow into a new underground discharge and preventing it going forward into the ‘fosse septique’ itself and although this was effective, it still didn’t really meet the requirements of the regulations.

Here are some shots that show the waste pipe that enters the grease trap, the somewhat crude way in which the grey water has been diverted and the now-blocked exit from the grease trap into the ‘fosse septique’.

When I started, the grease trap itself was full of smelly stagnant, black water and mud that I had to remove using the aforesaid plastic container. As I did so and emptied the smelly black mud out on a corner of my garden I was taken back to when I had to do such jobs while I was working as a student during my school and college holidays. Good training for much that followed later in life but no more appetising now than back then. It must have been years since it was last cleared out but pretty soon the task was done as the photographs show. Then it was time for Wim’s Drain Snake.

To be honest, as I began to shove it up the waste pipe, I wasn’t holding out much hope. I’d worn rubber gloves while clearing out the grease trap and had changed to leather gloves for doing this and as they were becoming wetter and more smelly, I was half looking forward to calling it a day. Nothing was coming out of the waste pipe into the grease trap except for the merest trickle of water, but as I worked the Drain Snake, more and more mud and foul debris was being dislodged from inside the pipe. I thought that I’d take the chance to put some hot water down the pipe from the sink in my kitchen, but when I went outside to check afterwards, practically none of it made its way to the grease trap, so I was beginning to feel rather despondent.

Nevertheless, I persisted with my efforts with the Drain Snake and as I managed to slowly push more and more of it into the pipe the tiny trickle of water slowly began to increase. Next thing there was a kind of ‘whoosh’ and a flood of black water came cascading out. I’d at last managed to clear the blockage in the waste pipe. What a relief this was! So I didn’t have to embark on a project to install a new waste pipe after all and there was actually nothing wrong with the old one, despite my fears of there being another leak under the floor of the wood store. I flushed the pipe through several times with hot water from both my kitchen and bathroom and by the end of it, the system was better than it has ever been since I’ve been here. The pipe was obviously partially blocked when I moved in and the problem was compounded in the day or so before I discovered the damage I’d caused with my wayward pick-axe when a small amount of soil had been able to enter the pipe and cause a further build-up on the original partial blockage.

But now all is well and I can look forward to taking long, hot showers again whenever I want. And should I decide to take another bath (unlikely…) I can even now look forward to seeing a vortex in the plug-hole as the water runs away, an experience that alone makes all the work involving smelly mud and black dirty water totally worthwhile 😉

Need more proof that all’s well with the world and spring is pushing on a door that’s already ajar? An hour or so ago, I saw this beautiful yellow butterfly flitting from bluebell to bluebell outside my kitchen door. I hope for her sake that she hasn’t made it just a day or so too early.