Plumbing Done Right Or Not At All

Last week I went to a house which had the kitchen sink clogged. It is a 30 year old house and the plumbing code years ago did not require clean outs on kitchen sink lines. This is a very bad situation. Now they are absolutely mandatory. The homeowner told me the last plumber she had called went on the roof to snake out the line. Now here she is with the same problem again. I told her I was not going to do that and gave her a price on installing a clean out on her sink line.

I have no doubt she was able to find someone willing to go on the roof to fix her problem but the potential liabilities are severe.  Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to insist that a job is done right. Even if it means walking away.

Doing the job right means updating to current code standards instead of putting a Band-aid on a problem. It means you won’t have to do it over and over again and of course, safety issues can be addressed at the same time.

A clean out is a fitting installed in a drain line with a threaded plug which can be easily removed in order to get a power snake through the line to clean it out. Every house is supposed to have a main line clean out, usually in the front yard, and clean out fittings on the kitchen line and the laundry line, as is current code. Regular bathroom sinks do not require clean outs as they would look bad if a pedestal sink was installed, therefore we do not have to install them.

Very old houses used to have access panels on accessible bathtub walls but this practice has been stopped, also because it does not look good. If your house is 20 years old, or less, and the kitchen sink is on an outside wall,  you will find a 2 inch threaded plug sticking out of the stucco about 10 inches above the ground. This is the clean out. If your sink is on an inside wall, or island, the clean out will be under the sink.

Next week we shall talk about proper water heater installation and maintenance.