Diaper Liners Stuck in Sewer Line

This post is part of  Dirty Diaper Laundry’s Cloth Diaper Carnival: Husbands and Cloth Diapering.

My husband 100% supported my decision to go cloth.  He was slightly hesitant at first, not understanding where the poop goes, but he quickly figured out that for the first 6 months with an exclusively breast fed baby it all went in the washer with no problem.  Let me get one thing straight, I do all of the diaper laundry, so this makes dad’s cloth diaper experience quite simple and easy!  That being said, he does change a lot of diapers and I really appreciate him for that.  So it really is a team effort!

Now, lets get to the dirty part.  It was my bright idea to begin using flushable liners in the cloth diapers once solid foods entered the picture.  I thought that it would really make things easier and we would just flush the liner and the poop and my husband wouldn’t have to risk touching anything more than the liner.  Well, all went smoothly for a month or two of lining each and every diaper so that poop could easily be flushed.  Suddenly it all came to a rather messy halt!

One day, while doing my diaper laundry, I noticed that the sink in the basement was backed up.  I immediately knew that the problem had to be those diaper liners.  We live in a house built in 1933 with an original sanitary pipe that is probably full of roots as it is.  So, knowing that I had really gotten us into this mess I knew I had to figure out a way to fix the problem.  I went to home depot and immediately bought the hardware to create a DIY diaper sprayer and checked out the price of a snake for the sanitary line.

Now comes the dirty part, I told my husband to pick up the snake on the way home from work because we had a big problem!  Luckily, he is handy enough to handle the task.  That night he lugged this huge electric powered 100′ snake into the house to clean out the line.  He spent about 2-3 hours undoing all that we had done with those diaper liners.  This was a messy job!  More messy than any silly cloth diaper change.  He pulled 10 or more of those liners out of our pipe and roots, dirt, and other junk.  As the snake pulled out of the pipe it sprayed what ever was in the pipe back at my husband, so he was covered in icky sanitary pipe spray!

Moral of the story, don’t flush anything other than toilet paper down an old drain.  Thanks to my saint of a husband we were able to avoid any really messy problems with a backed up line and we just had to get rid of those diaper liners!!!  In the meantime I had set up the diaper sprayer on our upstairs toilet and quickly showed my husband how well it actually worked.  I am lucky to have a supportive husband willing to do the dirty work!

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