Saturday, July 26, 2008

Trees drink from the toilet

I really, really like trees, but they shouldn't drink from the toilet; that's for the dogs and cats. It's not like the trees come through the window then bow down and take a sip or a long nice draw. They've mastered a lazy way of doing it, staying right in place. They just send their little roots out, find a tiny crack for their tiny root then make their way up through the toilet. Those tiny little roots multiply, get bigger and eventually take over the whole place, making it rather unpleasant when you try to use the toilet for its traditional, maybe even original purpose.

Happened to us a couple of years ago in our basement twa - lay.(makes things not so urgent to take care of until things get way out of hand.)
Called the plumber who came over, reamed the pipe out then put something right into the system to kill the little intruders for a year.
A few weeks ago, a plumber man came to our house to do a yearly update of putting the "stuff" in.
Same company, different guy. Said he couldn't put it into the basement toilet, couldn't get to right plumbing, yada, yada, yada. Ended up in the main bathroom. Turned off the water supply, vacuumed out the water (would never have thought that one up on my own!) then dumped the stuff in. It bubbled up with a vengeance over the top, all over the floor. He drizzled a bit of water in to control the stuff....it didn't work. Then I taught him a trick I learned from my mother-in-law-whose-toilet-never-worked-right. Dump a whole bucket in at once. He tried it and VOILA! it worked. A Couple more times of that and we were in business........ to the tune of over $200 just to dump stuff in the toilet (should have charged HIM for the new trick I taught him) ......

OH, and the plumber guy told us when he was done that we couldn't use any of the water in the house for 2 hours!!!!! We had company! We were going somewhere! What even happened to fair warning?

.........until my husband came home and told me that the stuff would end up in the septic system where we didn't have roots and miss the toilet system which did.
On top of that, because of extremely hard water, our toilet water supply line was now leaking all over the floor, into the basement and threatening to mess up some electric wiring.
Then we started smelling smoke. The boys slept upstairs for a few nights, the hard water eventually sealed off the leaks again, we replaced the valve anyway. I got the clean up a lot of floors and wash a lot of ickly towels, we got to righteously use a few cuss-type words (any word used with the right intonation and decibel level is a cuss-like word.)
'Nuf said. We are back to happy flushing.

PS Please forgive the broken thought lines....I think they are normal, but not everyone does.

1 comment:

Moo said...

You can always come next door and use my toilet, though you may have to use a bucket to flush it. I make no guarantees.