Several years ago we bought a 10-year-old house with an unfinished basement. The basement bathroom had stubbed-in plumbing pipes (for toilet, sink and tub drains) covered with plastic shopping bags and secured with duct tape.

We finished the basement, doing 95% of the work ourselves. I installed the sink, toilet and tub and hired a plumber to install and connect the water lines. Soon after installing the bathroom fixtures, we noticed a sewer smell of varying degrees in the basement bathroom. It seemed worse in the summer, so we thought it might be caused by water evaporating from the P traps. We tried running a little water in the sink and tub every day, but it didn’t always work.

The sink, toilet and tub worked great for several months. A few months later, while someone was taking a shower, the sewer pump in the lift station stopped working and soon after that, water started flooding up through the lift station lid. I removed the lid, pulled up the sewer pump and discovered something had gotten wedged in the chopper blade. I pulled out something that looked like a piece of a standard mop head. It was a wad of thick cotton strands, about the size of a softball and turned black by sewage.

Thinking that it was something left in the lift station pit that I had overlooked when I put in the sewage pump, I used a stick to stir the water and make sure there wasn’t anything else down in there. Satisfied that the pit was clear of foreign objects, I sealed it all up again.

This past Friday, the nightmare happened again. Unfortunately, we didn’t know about it until my son came out of the bathroom after the bathtub had completely drained to find that the pump had stopped again and a good part of the basement was flooded. We worked a few hour s to contain the damage and the next morning I took the lid off the lift station pit to check the pump. Once again, I found a softball sized wad of thick cotton strands wedged in the chopper, turned black after soaking in sewage.

I can only come up with one explanation for where this stuff is coming from. I figure that the builder, knowing that it was an unfinished basement, stuffed something like pieces of a cotton mop head in the plumbing vent pipes for the basement to keep birds and other animals from getting into the house through the exposed pipes in the basement.

Over the years, as the bathtub has been used, when the water was drained, it created a suction that pulled those pieces of cotton whatever down and into the plumbing, and eventually through to the lift station pit, where it gets sucked up into the chopper and stops the pump. Plugged vent pipes could also be the cause of the sewage smell.

Does this sound like I’m on the right track or am I missing something?
If I am right, is there anything I can do to make sure that the vents are no longer plugged? I don’t want to go through the flooding again.

Run a power snake from roof with cutter head. This will clean out anything in vent. You can also do this through waste lines.

Chuck

I know this is an old post, but just wanted to throw a bit of info your way. If tampons are getting flushed they can sometimes cause this binding of ejector pumps.