Water woes and plumbing problems....sigh...

[lupo pazzesco]

I don't know what the fuck my upstairs neighbors are doing, but they are seriously fucking with the plumbing in my apartment! I'm on the ground floor, and from what I understand, schematically, if they screw something up up there, shit flows downhill. Literally. These are the discoveries I have just made, while TRYING to clean up and get ready for bed.

1. My garbage disposal has apparently vomited remains from THEIR meals into MY sink. How do I know it's not mine? I'm guessing some of those bits are rice and beef. I haven't had rice in forever, and I don't eat beef. The family above me is Asian, and while I know it sounds like I'm classifying them, I know what I put in my disposal, and I never run rice down there because it expands when wet!

2. Due to the aforementioned disposal vomiting, BOTH sides of my sink are now clogged. I tried running the disposal because sometimes that helps flush things out, but all it did was send the water to one side of the sink (the side sans disposal), and when I shut it off, water burbled and spewed back into both sides of the sink. FANTASTIC! Ok, fine, I won't do dishes tonight, I'll just go to the bathroom, do my nightly ablutions, if you will, and go to bed. Which, leads me to:

3. My toilet won't flush all the way. You push the handle, and instead, the toilet bowl fills rapidly, almost to overflowing, then half of the water rushes out, but nothing really moves. Sweet merciful crap, this is getting REALLY annoying!! It takes 3 tries to get the bowl looking relatively clean-ish. Ugh. Maybe a hot bath will soothe me, and I can relax...but no, because:

4. There is a pipe above my bathtub, a small one. It's installed to act as backup drainage if my air conditioner is run too cold and too long. I leave my a/c on around 75 during the day, then stick it on 78 during the night and leave my bedroom fan on. So, not my pipes causing the near constant dripping of ice cold water into my bathtub, directly over where my head and chest would be situated were I to try and soak in a hot bath to relax.

I'm tired, and cranky, and I just put in a call to the maintenance hotline, but I'm reasonably sure that as I haven't locked myself out of my apartment, nor has my a/c gone out, it won't be classified as an emergency, so if I'm lucky, I MIGHT get a response tomorrow...maybe even before the office closes.

Buh! I hate people! Usually, most of my neighbors are nice, polite, and considerate, but I don't think the family upstairs realizes that everything THEY do has an adverse effect in MY home!!

[Der Cute]

Dear, it's not them.

It's the pipes.

I lived on a basement/ground floor apt for over 10 years, and I had a recurring toilet/tub/sink barf and overflow. Bout twice a year.

What's happening is that everyone is pushing stuff down the pipes, like they should. Gradually, as the mass/mess gets colder and congeals, it sticks to the sides of the pipe, the sewer pipe leaving your half of the building underground towards city sewer.

It doesn't matter WHO'S doing it, it matters that it's happening. What needs to be done is the maint people run a snake down the drain, the MAIN sewer connection in the building, possibly between your wall and adjacent apartment wall. That little sewer connection, getting snaked and scrubbed to about 50' out, will help your vertical pipe crud get out to the world.

It may help to have maint/landlord remind people to push more water behind flushed food, but it doesn't always stick. And when trying to drain meat/grease? You push it out with cold water, to congeal it locally and push out as a solid.

Good luck dear, and have a bleach bucket/mop handy. I had turds on my floor one year. They weren't mine.

Cutenoob

[lupo pazzesco]

Good luck dear, and have a bleach bucket/mop handy. I had turds on my floor one year. They weren't mine.Cutenoob

...

Well, that's a pleasant thought...really...



I just CLEANED my floors!!

[Exaspera]

We had that problem in an apartment, too. They ended up having to replace a sewerline in the parking lot. The whole building was clogged. I'd go ahead and call the hotline. This can get much worse.

[Midorikawa]

Oh dear. That's always fun. Just recently, wife and I went through that too. Upstairs neighbor moved out, and new younger couple moved in. First night, they went to take a shower, and discovered that the shower is totally plugged. They used a plunger, which forced water out of our washing machine drain pipe. O_o

The next 2 days, stuff would randomly overflow or back up, and of course, by the time I got the HOA to send a plumber, it was all back to normal, and had cleared itself. Plumbing problems suck. :-(

[trailerparkmedic]

In the Loop Properties

These are the apartment locators I used to find my current place. I don't think they use the loop as a firm boundary, and they stuck to my price range and area I wanted to live in (not easy, since I had a pretty low price range for the area).

I hope your pipes are fixed soon.

[Tanasi]

When my oldest daughters were apartment dwellers their upstairs neighbors put anything and everything down the disposal and it was coming up in their kitchen sink. The maintenance man said there was nothing he could do except unstop the line and ask the upstairs for to limit their disposal use. Well I fixed it by putting a check valve on the drain line. The CV didn't stop the clogs but it did stop the messes showing up in their sink.
Disposals in multi-story apartment buildings are a bad-idea.

[HYHYBT]

As for the drip over the tub... well, you could take a bath with an umbrella

[telecom_goddess]

Oh you don't even want to know the plumbing problems I had in my old apartment. Not the one I moved into earlier this year, but prior.

Last year on Easter Sunday the valve flew off our toilet in our only bathroom and water shot out for a good while, flooding my bathroom, hallway and part of the living room. Did I mention I lived above someone at the time? I flooded them out pretty bad. And then fast forward to December of last year and we had a mystery leak from our bathroom to theirs...never did find out what it was but both of us had our bathrooms torn out multiple times trying to fix it.

My place I'm in now I'm on the bottom so hopefully karma won't bite me in the ass . But we also have 2 bathrooms and so far not a single problem. And I'm real careful with that toilet valve thing

[Sonoma]

The water heater in my old apartment rusted out (long story, I had the manager out to look at it, he said it was fine, the pan it sat in would drain the water out before it flooded the apartment. OK, but the water that the heater's been sitting in also rusted out the bottom, causing the thing to blow up when I was gone one weekend.) My downstairs neighbors got the managers up at 12:30 in the morning to let them know of the problem. Flooded my apartment, their apartment, ruined my floors, destroyed stuff in my laundry room. Made a huge mess - all because they insisted it wasn't going to hurt anything.

[Geek King]

And when trying to drain meat/grease? You push it out with cold water, to congeal it locally and push out as a solid.

As far as I've ever been told, you should never pour grease/meat leavings down the drain. Let it cool a bit and pour into container (glass or metal, plastic may melt with heat) with a lid, then throw out that container when full. We tend to use empty pickle jars around my place.

[Der Cute]

As far as I've ever been told, you should never pour grease/meat leavings down the drain. Let it cool a bit and pour into container (glass or metal, plastic may melt with heat) with a lid, then throw out that container when full. We tend to use empty pickle jars around my place.

well yeah but if you have to, you do it cold

[Evil Queen]

I've never heard that. I've always been told to pour very hot water down the drain before and after pouring grease down.

[Kogarashi]

We tend to use empty pickle jars around my place.

Empty cans here, from stuff like canned fruit and veggies. A lot easier than worrying about congealed grease clogging the sink.

[dalesys]

My mother (up to about 15 years ago) saved all the grease and made soap, using lye.