Soil pipe for downstairs toilet disintegrating - who to call?

krazyklown

Hi,

Been having problems lately with a downstairs toilet blocking for the last couple of months. Its located under the stairs of a semi-detached on the attached side of the house and flows underneath the kitchen and into a sewerage pipe out the back. The toilet had been backing up on and off for the last couple of months and we avoided using it.

Got drain rods last week and seemed to resolve the issue as a huge amount of sewerage went down and the toilet worked grand all week. Checked the drain this morning and there was a pipe of pipe at the inspection point. Got the rods out again and using the 'scraper' tool, a load more pieces emerged (see pics - just sent scraper up and pulled back). They are fairly brittle and looking at the drain they appear to be the 'topside' of the drain (the bottom side is the standard orange plastic).

Just wondering would anyone know who I should be contacting to resolve this? Should i bother with a cctv survey to get an idea of the extent of the problem? Then is it a plumber or a builder I approach to actually do the work? And the biggie - are we looking at digging up the entire drain to replace it or is it possible to fix it without ripping up flooring?

Cheers for any info!
KK

BlinkingLights

Either that's an extremely old sewer pipe or its builders debris .
That looks like wood?

You'd need to get talking to a plumber who would put you in touch with a drainage specialist.

krazyklown

BlinkingLights wrote: »

Either that's an extremely old sewer pipe or its builders debris .
That looks like wood?

You'd need to get talking to a plumber who would put you in touch with a drainage specialist.

Cheers for the reply - house was built in 1989 I believe - it's definitely not wood, would it be a kind of ceramic? It broke up / kind of crumbled when i handled it.

K.Flyer

I can assure you that what you have there are not pieces of your drain pipe.
That has been sitting in the bottom of your drain pipe for a long time and is either grease build up (yes it can look like that after a couple of years) or else its from cement / tile adhesive being washed down during work being done.
Cheapest solution for now is to give the pipe another few runs with your rods to see if you can get it all out, then use the toilet as per usual to see if there are any more issues.
If you want to be sure of having it cleaned out properly, you need to get a Drain Cleaning company to wash it out using high pressure water jetting.

krazyklown

K.Flyer wrote: »

I can assure you that you have there are not pieces of your drain pipe.
That has been sitting in the bottom of your drain pipe for a long time and is either grease build up (yes it can look like that after a couple of years) or else its from cement / tile adhesive being washed down during work being done.
Cheapest solution for now is to give the pipe another few runs with your rods to see if you can get it all out, then use the toilet as per usual to see if there are any more issues.
If you want to be sure of having it cleaned out properly, you need to get a Drain Cleaning company to wash it out using high pressure water jetting.

Seriously? Wow, there's quite a bit of it - I stopped rodding as I was afraid that I was breaking it up more and it was time to get a professional in. It's very brittle so i assumed it was piping that had degraded over time.

That's a relief although it means getting the old clothes and rods out again!