IamAllThumbs
Active Member
Some family members were working yesterday so we are celebrating Thanksgiving today.
While cooking, we ran the sink with the garbage disposal running and the area under the sink flooded hard.
My troubleshooting: the water was coming out of the tall black drain pipe in the picture even though the disposal went straight in (pipe taken apart). As far as I can tell the two connect and go down to my crawl space to the sewer. I believe the pipe is clogged somewhere to the sewer, so when you run the disposal, it forces the water into it's pipe, it can't go into the sewer so I comes back up the left pipe which has an open top, that's where the drain pipe from the dishwasher goes into (the flexible brownish pipe).
When I peek in the pipe the disposal connected to, I can see it's full of water to the elbow.
You can see the left pipe is glued in, not screwed together, and the pipe in the crawl space is similarly glued without a cleaning access that I can see.
My guess is that I have at least two ways to fix:
1) run a snake through the pipe the disposal was plugged in. My only worry is that this flooding came very suddenly. O hope there is t one single large obstruction that went past the disposal and somehow would be pushed further by a snake.
2) cut the pipe in the catwalk space, hope the clog is in the vertical section and not further down, clean the pipe and use various adaptors to glue/fix it later
I have never used a crank snake, it seems that I can rent one at Home Depot for $40, so I think I will try that first but see if I can be gentle until I get more advice here. I'd anything it should allow me to diagnose how far the blockage is?