Welcome Back Rosenthal

What? You think I forgot about the home repair stuff. NAHHH. I just got all caught up with the TV programs and comic book stories. But tonight, for your enjoyment, I bring you a fourth installment of the downspout-sewer line job. So let’s begin! As you may recall, if you read parts 1 through 3, I had 2 clogged up downspouts. Or rather junk was both stuck up in the gutter AND the water wasn’t draining out to the sewer once it got to ground level. On one side of the house, there was dirt area I could dig up. But on the other side of the house it was a cement walkway. I was very worried about trying to get to a sewer line under there. The problem was pretty in-your-face though. Since it was winter the downspout had actually become full of ice about 4 feet high. The clogged water had just stuck in there and frozen

In fact one funny thing that happened was once I took out the connecting screws the rainwater from the gutter was actually gushing out of the screw holes.

Actually that photo above and the one below were taken after it warmed up a little and the ice melted. But if you look down in the gutter, there’s all that water just sitting there.

The first thing, even before any drainage work, was to just clear the damn downspouts. Like I said the gunk in the gutter had been up there I don’t know how long, so it had filled the downspouts too.

OOKAAAY! Things are gonna get even uglier from here on out, so brace yourself. This is all the mud, leaves, and assorted debris that were down in the whole. Like I said, this drain hole was surrounded by cement and I REALLY was hoping I wouldn’t have to go down into the ground and pull out a broken pipe.

But again let me show you some of the chunks I was pulling out of that spout!

And here are my main tools; the old wetvac, and the router.

Again, the mud, leaves, vines were down there pretty good. So here you can see it’s clogged up the wetvac hose. And even when I pull it all out you can see that NOTHING is getting through there, certainly not any rainwater.

But this story DOES have a happy ending. When I was all said and done, and after pulling tons of gunk out of that hole I was finally able to take a garden hose and shoot water down there for a full five minutes and nothing ever backed up. So I had clean water removal finally happening. Next to my hose I left one of the giant rocks I pulled out of that hole. So mud by itself, or leaves by themselves, or even vines might not clog you up. But all that stuff, plus stones, rocks or cement MIXED is a death trap for good water flow!

Ok I admit it. I‘m a bastard. This series of photos has been sitting on the camera really for MONTHS and I’m not putting them here in Part 3 until today. You know what happened don’t you? The finish to this project came at a busy time, and it was so easy to do I just got to thinking “hey they can probably figure it out…” and blah, blah, blah, I was to lazy to get back over her and upload the pictures and write a few words to go with it. And the WORST part is I actually need to do a Part 4 to show what happened to the downspout on the other side of the house because it was a totally different situation. But I PROMISE I’ll do that with the week! All-righty, so where’d we leave off? Right, there was this hole in the ground and a downspout hanging, and I needed some kind of pipe or something to connect to the sewer line.

So the original plan was to go get regular tile/ceramic pipe section as seen in Part 2 of this series to replace the broken one. But here’s the problem; the connecting lip on the pipe wasn’t going to fit. I mean the reason it was broken in the first place was because the underground pipe section was too close to the house, so they had chipped 20 percent of the lip off so that other 80 percent could fit. You may not have this problem so you can probably go to the store and buy a regular replacement pipe. I decided to go another way. I went to Home Depot and I saw 2 things in the gutter department that I could jimmy together to server MY MASTER PLAN! The first thing was a flexible gutter-to-downspout section. And the next thing was a metal connector unit. It occurred to me that I could use this setup to connect the downspout to the sewer pipe underground and the flexibility could allow me to get the 2 parts joined perfectly.

And the pipe underground was almost exactly the right size, but the flexible joiner had this squared off section that did NOT fit inside the hole. I decided to cut it off. And the photo below is NOT how I did it, but I wanted to indicate “cutting” with a photo, so I took this picture. I did think about doing this but, that was wrong kind of blade anyway.

But here’s how easy it was to install. Just stick it in the hole onto the next pipe. As you can see in just one day we had some winter winds blow a bunch of leaves in my cold hole.

I took some waterproof adhesive and applied it to the sewer line pipe in the ground, and you can see that stone that would have gotten in the way of a pipe with a lip too next to the wall (on the left side of the pipe).

Here’s all the pieces connected. I and I know it looks crooked, but I haven’t even put the dirt in there yet. Remember the goal is to get flow from the downspout to the sewer. At the beginning of this project that was NOT happening. The pipes were full of mud and debris and the pipes were so ill-fitting that whatever water did manage to go down the pipes would just seeping into the ground. Once I connect the downspout to the house with one of those metal straps it’ll be straight again.

It had gotten so cold here in Chicago that my wet dirt had FROZEN. And to get it loose I actually had to get a pick to break it up into clumps. And then stick, basically, a bunch of rock shaped dirt back into the hole. I knew that once it warmed up it and got wet it would settle and fill up all the air pockets. And that’s exactly what happened; it got hot for few days, rained, the dirt sunk, and then I had to find some more dirt to fill up the depression.

Ok so here are all the pipes and dirt put back together just like Humpty-Dumpty. And there’s some of my frozen dirt that had to melt before I could put it back in the hole. Oh and one last thing-the flexible replacement “pipe” was only about 7 dollars so it was not only a practical solution to the problem but cheap!

All right so it did make it up to 49 degrees today, nice and warm. So despite being tired from all night computer building I DID get out of bed and spend 7 hours in the mud doing the work on the downspout drainage problem. To recap; BOTH downspouts were not conveying the gutter water away, and away in my case would be to and underground pipe next to the house right out to the street sewer. I had no flow at all, so water was just pooling on one side of the house, and just spilling on the walkway on the other side of the house.

So let

So OK, I’ll admit it, I’ve been involved with multiple outdoor projects. But actually they’re all connected; the siding installation made me look at the gutter situation, and the gutter situation made me look at the downspout situation. The downspouts are in place but water should be going somewhere right? But it isn’t it’s going down the downspout and just of sitting there. Or rather if it IS draining to someplace it’s doing so VERY slowly. And I’m convinced that water sitting next to a house foundation isn’t a good idea. In fact (and I haven’t done the research) I get the feeling that if a LOT of water pools onto the ground and freezes it would expand.

I have a crack in my foundation that was sealed up, but it is coincidentally very close to the spot where the water that isn’t draining pools. As you can see here, The snows out there, but I’ve started to move it.

Where the water is supposed to go via gravity. And the old crack.

So initially I’m looking at all this water go into the downspout drainage and it’s just not going anywhere, it’s just pooling along the side of the house. The water is supposed to go down that whole, connect to a pipe underground that runs parallel to the house right on out to the sewer line in front of the house.

I had 3 different shovels. A big one for the snow, a regular one for the actual dirt, and a pointy one for the tight places. Yeah, I know there’s an official name for the pointy one. And after a while I had a hole about a foot and a half down, and about 2 feet long.

I could see I would might digging a while to find the underground pipe to the sewer, since it’s supposed to be about 3 feet down below the water table. So I decided to get a little closer to the downspout connection pipe. As I started carefully digging the dirt away from the pipe water started to seep into my whole.

And in the next photo you can see what happened as I moved even more dirt-more water came gushing out. So the location of the problem is no longer in doubt.

The only issue now was; is the tile pipe cracked and going to need replacing OR is there a clog in the pipe. I can see the water setting in that (vertical) pipe, but I don’t know if there’s just stuff in there or is the pipe cracked and not flowing into the horizontal pipe to the sewer. I’ll let you know as I get in there. I’ll connect a link to that post.