Drain clogs - just how bad can it get?

Yes, on rare and extreme cases the picture is correct. I sure hope you do not have the same problem and the problem is solved. Good luck.

Yeah at my old place the trees were a major problem. We ended up just cutting them all down.

I've had this problem for years. Usually it can be temporarily fixed by putting an "electric eel" down, which has a cutter on the end to cut the roots out. It doesn't mean that your garden has to be dug up and the pipes replaced, but it will mean a regular visit by the plumber every few months to do it again. Root foaming treatment, involving pumping special foam down the pipes to stop the roots growing can make things good for a year, but, of course, then has to be done once again.

Indeed the only way to stop it absolutely is to put a camera down, locate the position of the break in the pipe, dig it up and replace it.

I've been through some tree root problems with my house. A good plumber will have a power auger, with special bits that can chew through tree roots, provided they're not too bad. Liquid stuff isn't going to cut it, trust me. If all your guy is offering is liquid or digging up your yard, you need to find a better plumber.

Also, there is a product called Root Gobbler. It's crystals of copper sulfate, which kill tree roots. They don't damage the tree, the root killing just takes place within the pipe. I use it twice a year to keep things cleared up.

I had my front yard dug up and pipes replaced a few years ago due to tree roots. Not fun and not cheap.

Hehe I remember that eel all to well.

That picture seriously scares me. Wow. I hope everything works out well (and not too expensive) for you.

save yourself a tonne of money and do it yourself! go to a rental place and get the scope...plumbing is not that hard.
According to your coordinates, you are in Quebec, so maybe the melting frost broke a pipe somewhere. If it is outside of your house, then you are screwed to a point if it is in your house you should be ok!
bonne chance

Agreed. Plumbers need to know four things. 1: Crap flows downhill, 2: payday is friday, 3: always pay your union dues, and, uh, there's a fourth but it's not important?

In case i have insulted any plumbers: I think the guys who engineer commercial plumbing systems are respectable and talented people. The guys who put plumbing into new houses, somewhat less so. The guys who come out to your house to pour liquid plumr down the drain and tell you that you'll need to spend thousands of dollars? Bunch of highschool dropouts and alcoholics.

My neighbor had a similar issue a few years back, except their snake got caught up on something and stuck. They ran the camera down the drain line and determined that there was no cleanout and they couldn't figure out why the snake was stuck.

They proclaimed that the drain line was rotting orangeburg pipe and that the drain pipe would have to be replaced.

"orangeburg" pipe is drain pipe that was manufactured in the city of orangeburg in (iirc) the 1940's. It's just laminated tarpaper. It was legal to use in most of the US for about 10 years, and it does have a tendency to rot and deform and get holes in itself - but it's nowhere near as common as plumbers who know how to operate a backhoe say it is.

In tucson, for example, there was enough fraud over this that the city eventually published a map showing which neighborhoods were developed during the time period when it was legal to use orangeburg in arizona.

So, they tore up my neighbor's lawn and irrigation system (and killed one of my trees in the process).

The cleanout riser was 8" under the soil about 12" back from the sidewalk, exactly where the plans said it was.

Since this house was built about 14 years before orangeburg hit the market, the drain pipe was ceramic.

A judicious application of root killer in the spring and fall for a few years would have prevented or even reversed the root infiltration problem they had.

If they'd looked for the cleanout where it was supposed to be instead of just declaring that they didn't see it on the camera so it must not exist, they could have removed the snake from the drain pipe through the cleanout riser.

They also failed to get a permit for their excavation, so the city shut them down half way through, so the house was without a drain for 4 days.

$13,000, a torn up lawn, broken irrigation pipes, and a dying silverleaf maple because some guy with his butt crack showing didn't see the cleanout on his camera and didn't want to spend a few minutes digging with a shovel to see if it was where it was supposed to be.

Rent the camera yourself. Buy your own snake - I'll bet it's less than $20 at Canadian Tire (I know it's less than $20 at Harbor Freight Tools in the US).

And put some root killer down your drain every spring and fall if you have trees in the same area as your drain pipe.

You could do what they'd done at a house I looked at buying a few years ago. Just redirect your house drains into the stream across the street. Really helps improve drain flow rate...

Oh, I forgot to say - drain root killer should be applied when it can be left sitting in the drain pipe for the longest possible time.

So, right before you go to bed, you flush it down the toilet nearest where the drain exits the house - and then don't flush again until morning.

You can do the same thing with the caustic drain cleaning stuff, fwiw.

And it does not hurt the tree - it just kills the portion of the root that is in the pipe.

Good friend of mine who legitimately had an orangeburg drain line bought himself 5 years of time with nothing but root killer. Once each spring, once each fall.

And then he rented the backhoe himself and replaced his own drain pipe. Spent less than a thousand. Did it in 2 days. A good plumber might do it in one day, but also might not.

Years ago, when I was in college in the States, I rented a single room basement and every spring, the drains would backup and all the crap will come frothing out from the shower area and loo.

I ended up calling the landlord, who asked his plumber to put a snake down the drain. The crap that was floating around my basement apartment (and it was all over the place, the whole room was flooded) was sucked out via an industrial strength vacuum - and it stank BAD!

In my case, what happened was that each time the snow thawed, it brought alot of leaves and misc junk into the drains (plus roots of trees I suppose). So every snow thaw, there was this risk. The plumber had to shove the snake right thru to the main street sewage pipe to clear it out (about 200m is my guess).

I ended up calling the landlord (he retains his plumber to service his numerous properties) every time I saw bubbled coming from the drain. Better to be safe than sorry!

Dad just went through this. Thankfully we have a great friend who works in construction and plumbing just happens to be one of his fortes. I think my father spent nearly $500 fixing the problem and he felt it was expensive and back breaking work. The culprit was roots from a nearby tree. The tree was cut down and new pipe had to be put down. Regardless, our friend told us we saved over $10k doing it ourselves.

Probably 15 years ago I remember we had some issues at my parent's house (my house too at the time). We had the Roto-Rooter guy come a few times and put the cutting snake down the toilet to fix it. One day he couldn't fix it like that, so they had to dig this huge (at the time) hole in my front yard. After they replaced the pipe they put in an access pipe right above, so they could just enter the drain from the front yard to clear up future issues.