Bowers Street Main Stack Clogged

The third floor tenant in my Bowers street property called me while I was at work today. He said that there was sewage flooding the basement and that it smells really bad.

Great.

So when I arrived in Lowell tonight I went straight to Bowers street. As I entered the basement it smelled as if I was entering a sewer. I walked into the basement to find 60% of the floor covered in 1" of liquid feces, brown colored and all. I laid down some things to walk on and checked the main stack. It looked like it was coming from below the house... where the main stack connects to the street sewer pipe. Hmm...

I don't have the time or the tools to deal with this, so I called Roto-Rooter, an emergency plumbing service I've used in the past. They told me they would have someone out there within two hours, so I went to the factory and completed the workout for today.

An hour and a half later, the plumber called me. He told me it was going to be $420. Blah. I needed to get it fixed ASAP. Fourty-five minutes later he's done; $420 for fourty-five minutes worth of work! I keep telling myself that it would have taken me a lot longer had I tried doing it myself, because I don't have all the fancy tools and gadgets he had. It's so hard for me to spend money on something that I know I could do myself.

I guess sometimes you have to know when to outsource.

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  1. “I keep telling myself that it would have taken me a lot longer had I tried doing it myself, because I don’t have all the fancy tools and gadgets he had.”

    Exactly. I tried to tell the wife that when she wanted to fix the kitchen drain. Instead of the old pipes under the basement floor, we capped it and took it across the cieling. I wanted to hire someone and let them drill a hole in the main pipe but she insisted her way would be lots less. So we did it her way. We tapped the kitchen drain into the pipe for the sump pump (which led to the sewer pipe). Every time the pump would go off the kitchen drain gurgled.

    I ended up paying 200.00 to get that fixed to sell the place. We don’t talk about that anymore to each other…. wasn’t a fun day.