The war of the kitchen sink has stepped up a notch. The sink fired its opening salvo back in the summer, when it began to drain slowly. Specifically, the left hand sink began to take over-long to empty itself. We have two sinks, side by side, a wonderful arrangement that does much to preserve domestic harmony, and which I heartily recommend to anyone who can find the space in their kitchen. It means that one of you can wash their hands, or empty the teapot, or do whatever sink-based thing you need to do at that moment, while the other continues washing up, or scraping carrots, or whatever they were already doing in the other sink. Apart from dual controls on the electric blanket, it is one of the most tension eliminating household arrangements you can have.
The sinks have developed a secular version of distinct kosher roles. The left hand sink is the food sink, for washing vegetables and doing washing up that won't go in the dishwasher. The right hand sink is for the cats' dishes, and is the one I choose for washing plant pots and labels. It acts as an overflow space for standing saucepans to soak, but we wouldn't immerse anything we were going to eat, or eat off or out of, in it.
I announced my intention of buying a bottle of drain clearing gunk. The Systems Administrator implored me not to do that, since it would upset the ecology of the septic tank, and insisted that a quick go with the plunger would fix it. It did, for about ten minutes, then the sink began draining slowly again.
As the weeks passed, the drainage issue got worse, and more obscure. Sometimes, running hot water down the sink seemed to clear it. Sometimes, the right hand sink wouldn't drain, and the left hand one would. If the right hand sink was full of water with the cats dishes soaking in it, sometimes running the water out of the right sink had the effect of making the left one drain, when it wouldn't before. The SA admitted that the problem had gone beyond the plunger stage. Two bottles of drain clear failed to have any lasting effect. The SA rodded both drains, then took everything out from the cupboards under the sinks, dismantled all the plumbing, and cleaned every pipe. Twice. The left hand sink went on not draining, while the right hand sink generally did drain, though not perfectly, despite the fact that every inch of pipework above the point where the outlets combined had been cleaned. The SA began to wear a haunted look. A friend suggested it must be something to do with airlocks, while I favoured a Douglas Adams disruption in the space-time continuum, like the one accounting for the sofa half way up the stairs.
The SA announced that we were going to have to lift the manhole cover outside the front door, and go in from the bottom. This in turn would entail lifting the wooden deck that now sits over the manhole cover to act as a vaguely scenic front door step, which by now has been partially obscured by an over-vigorous juniper growing over it. My services were booked, to help lift the deck, and to cut back the juniper, since the SA held that if one of my plants was going to be knackered, I had better do the fell deed myself. The promise of spending this Sunday afternoon cleaning out the drains dangled before me like a hot date.
The SA started studying on-line plumbing forums. There would be such a thing, of course. The general consensus chimed with the SA's previous diagnosis, that we had a fat ball floating about somewhere in the sink outlet. Pouring large amounts of boiling water down the sink was recommended, and when I came in from the garden mid-morning as well as two kettles on the go and the stock pot of hot water, there was a powerful smell of vinegar, as bicarbonate of soda and vinegar was another recommended treatment, along with the advice not to spend up on proprietary drain cleaners but just to buy the cheapest basic bleach.
By lunchtime the SA had announced a change of battle plan. We were not going to lift the deck and the manhole cover, since the SA was not convinced that the sink outlet went there. However, the Chaenomeles under the kitchen window was going to have to go, so that the SA could dismantle the sink drain from the outside. In deference to my feelings, rather than require me to execute the Japanese quince myself, the SA set to with loppers. It was going to have to be substantially reduced anyway, to allow the window fitters access to the outside of the kitchen window when they come, so I was already more or less resigned to its loss, but still not looking forward to doing the deed myself.
Tomorrow, the SA is going to unscrew the kitchen waste pipe outside the kitchen window, and rod it as far downstream as possible, or if necessary jet it with the high pressure water jetter. I'll be at work, but I have an uneasy feeling that this may not be the final, decisive battle in the war of the kitchen sink.
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