Lolo611
New Member
About 9 months ago, I moved into a house built in 1941. It’s a realtor flip, and no one lived in it for a few years. 3 months in, we started having issues with the downstairs drains—after a few plumbing visits to snake and clear clogs that would leave things perfect for a week or two and then clogged again, the plumbers dug in our yard to install a cleanout (as they couldn’t find one for our house) so they could run a camera down the mainline. While digging, they discovered a shoddy repair job where two pipes in the yard weren’t fitting together, repaired it, ran their camera, and all was clear.
Fast forward two months, and we start getting a gurgle in our downstairs shower every now and then when the downstairs toilet is flushed. Plumber comes to look, opens the cleanout, and by flushing up and downstairs toilets gets a clog to pass. Seems to fix it. Says we should just do that when we hear the noise and clear it on our own. Easy.
But now the gurgle is happening almost daily. It’s fine in the morning to do any combination of showering and flushing up and downstairs, but sometimes after an evening shower downstairs, the shower drain gurgles when you flush the downstairs toilet. And then gurgles again when you flush again. And then the toilet stops flushing and just fills and slowly drains, and you can hear water running in pipes behind the wall upstairs and down, and only after waiting and flushing upstairs and down and waiting some more does it magically clear. It took almost 30 minutes of flushing and waiting tonight to get it back to normal. But once it clears, every drain and toilet in the house works perfectly fine.
We’ve tried an enzyme treatment, but it didn’t seem to help. The realtor who flipped the house did remove an upstairs sink and add a laundry room upstairs with a studor mini-vent in it (that we hear burbles from at times when the downstairs toilet isn’t flushing properly), but the plumbers think that work looks fine, and we still have a roof vent as well. The camera run of our mainline a few months ago revealed nothing.
Any ideas at all for what might be going on or how to fix it? We’ve developed a lovely relationship with our plumbers, but can’t afford to just keep putting a bandaid on things—we’d love to get it diagnosed so we can get it fixed.
Fast forward two months, and we start getting a gurgle in our downstairs shower every now and then when the downstairs toilet is flushed. Plumber comes to look, opens the cleanout, and by flushing up and downstairs toilets gets a clog to pass. Seems to fix it. Says we should just do that when we hear the noise and clear it on our own. Easy.
But now the gurgle is happening almost daily. It’s fine in the morning to do any combination of showering and flushing up and downstairs, but sometimes after an evening shower downstairs, the shower drain gurgles when you flush the downstairs toilet. And then gurgles again when you flush again. And then the toilet stops flushing and just fills and slowly drains, and you can hear water running in pipes behind the wall upstairs and down, and only after waiting and flushing upstairs and down and waiting some more does it magically clear. It took almost 30 minutes of flushing and waiting tonight to get it back to normal. But once it clears, every drain and toilet in the house works perfectly fine.
We’ve tried an enzyme treatment, but it didn’t seem to help. The realtor who flipped the house did remove an upstairs sink and add a laundry room upstairs with a studor mini-vent in it (that we hear burbles from at times when the downstairs toilet isn’t flushing properly), but the plumbers think that work looks fine, and we still have a roof vent as well. The camera run of our mainline a few months ago revealed nothing.
Any ideas at all for what might be going on or how to fix it? We’ve developed a lovely relationship with our plumbers, but can’t afford to just keep putting a bandaid on things—we’d love to get it diagnosed so we can get it fixed.
