It's early Sunday morning, and Katie and I are still drifting in and out of sleep cycles in bed. Our son-in-law is showering down the hall in the upstairs shower. Our daughter bursts into our room, "Mom, Dad, the toilet is overflowing into the basement shower."
"Did you try to unplug it with the plunger?!"
"I can't get it to work!"
I run downstairs and attempt to unplug the toilet with a plunger myself. Nope.
Poopy water slowly flowing out of the basement shower and leaking on to the bathroom floor and basement EVERYWHERE. Katie and Eliza scramble for every towel in the house. "Grayson, get out of the shower!" We all spend the next 1/2 hour cleaning and mopping, and I focus on unplugging.
Clearly the plumbing must be plugged downstream of the toilet.
I call a 24-hour plumbing service, and they show they can send someone out between 1:00 PM and 4:00 PM. Ok. Cool.
"Nobody flush the toilets or use the shower or the sinks until we get this figured out!"
I drop everyone off at church in Leavenworth, and continue on to Home Depot in Wenatchee to purchase a 25' drain snake. And a fan to dry out the floor.
After arriving home with drain snake and fan and my churchy occupants, even the 25 foot snake won't clear the clog. We wait for the on-call plumber to show up. I get a text at 4:00 pm telling me he's on his way.
...plumber never shows.
(Turns out, when you call the afterhours/weekend emergency plumbing service, their number and the actual technician's number aren't connected. Texts were going through, but no calls to my phone. Apparently, he attempted to call before coming (because we're a long ways "out") but I never got the call, so he just didn't come.)
No text. Nothing.
For the next day, we make use of the construction port-o-potty up the street and a very kind neighbor's cabin a few doors down; our garden hose and a 5 gallon bucket became the dish washing sink.
My son-in-law and I have to leave Sunday evening to return home because we both have to work on Monday.
Monday morning, my wife talks with the plumber, and he's up there early afternoon, and quickly determines that somehow the septic controller box (that controls the pump and the alarm) has come unplugged.
So, there was never anything to unclog. We just needed to "plug in" the septic system.
However, the original contractor who wired up the septic a few years ago also NEVER should have wired it with a plug on a GFCI. It should have been hardwired in to our panel. ...grumble.)
The plumber service call was a cool $150.00. Katie immediately got on the phone with a septic pumping service, and they had a truck up the next morning.
$433 later, our septic system is pumped out.
Knowing Summer is the time to get issues like this resolved--before snow renders the road impassable--I feel a compelling need to restore full confidence in "the system."
So I schedule an electrician who specializes in these kinds of things the next morning to make sure the pump switches and electrical are in good working order. I drive back up to the cabin after dropping my son-in-law at the airport Tuesday evening to meet the electrician the next morning. (Katie and the kids are now gone boat camping to Lake Chelan.)
He didn't find any problem with the float switches or the pump. Thankfully the electrical box IN the float tank had not gotten flooded.
Be he did find a few problems: In addition to the whole system being connect with an easily removable plug: Both circuit breakers in the septic controller box -- a 10 amp and a 20 amp -- were connected to a single 15 amp breaker. Anyone see a problem there...?!! They were cross wired, and the wires between them were getting overloaded and corroded...
The electrician installed an additional circuit so that the pump and the controller are now on separate, 20 amp circuits. And he took out the GFCI outlet and hardwired the controller box in to the panel.
He also found that the controller breaker in the septic controller box was going bad. It's a bit special, and he didn't have one, so I ordered a new replacement by mail and replaced the funky one a week later.
$1,954 later and I have now restored confidence that our septic system will function properly in to the coming Winter season.
For those of you keeping track, that's a cool $2,537 of unplanned expense to restore confidence that we can flush our toilets. But I'm grateful we actually found a few sleeping problems and got everything properly installed now, albeit a few years late.
A vigorous bleach mopping followed by an aggressive floor fan appear to have abated the smell in the basement.