As a routine part of their "Foundation Repair," Baird Foundation Repair contracted Gem Plumbing to do a Hydrostatic Test of my drains. Hydrostatic tests block the main drain pipe at your cleanout (just as roots used to do periodically for my drain, until I removed all the plants causing this issue, including a big potted plant that had grown its roots through the hole at the bottom of the pot and down to my drain) then raise the drain water to just above the slab (if you have no showers they need to remove a toilet to monitor this), fill the under slab drain pipes until the water reaches slab level, and then see if it drops down. If it drops down, you have a leak. And if you have such a leak, the foundation company will void your warranty unless you fix it. Engineers, Home Inspectors, and others will endlessly tell you that drain leaks are the #1 cause of foundation problems (I don't think they were the cause of mine, as I shall discuss more in a later post) and must be fixed, sooner or later, regardless of the (nearly always astronomical) cost.
Rather than get Gem Plumbing to fix this, I called my usual plumber, Primo Plumbing, who I have trusted most recently. Unfortunately, Primo Plumbing does not do beneath slab drain work, but they referred me to Chambliss Plumbing.
I trusted and liked Chambliss Plumbing before. Way back around 2012 I got their name from John Jones, the master electrician who I trusted more than any other contractor and who did lots of special electrical projects for me like the trio of isolated ground outlets for my stereo in the living room (and fixed code compliance issues in my old home I would never have thought about). I figured Chambliss was another top shelf company like John Jones, and they always seemed to be.
Chambliss did all the plumbing associated with my partial master bathroom remodel in 2014. They installed a new Kohler Belweather tub and toilet. I got a visit from Mr Chambliss himself to help in configuring these things, especially the dual tub and shower valves, to my dream specifications. Mr Chambliss was a plumber I respected because, like all good plumbers, he refused to do things exactly the way I wanted, but we came up with compromises that satisfied me anyway.
Unfortunately, that powered flush toilet--which included a Flushmate powered flushing device inside the otherwise empty tank--gave me endless problems, mainly that it decided every now and then to stop flushing at all, which was, needless to say, a big stinking problem.
And unlike old fashioned toilets, where you can go down to Lowes to get replacement flush valves and the like, with a powered flush toilet you must get proprietary parts and they are sufficiently complex you will probably need a plumber to fix them. (Ultimately I figured out that I could buy a tiny part, the so-called duckbill valve which is a tiny piece of plastic that looks like an unrolled condom, and that would often, but not always, fix the problem.)
So I had Chambliss out many times to fix the toilet. Finally, even after I'd learned about the Duckbill Valve and how to replace it, the Flushmate simply would not work. A pair of Chambliss plumbers spent hours trying to get it to work, and even had a long talk with Sloan on the phone. Finally, it seems the that thing which made it work was leveling my toilet. It seems that my foundation had shifted just enough to keep the Flushmate from working in 2019 as it had worked in 2014 when it was installed. They might have replaced the Flushmate too, I can't remember, but it seemed like they would try every other trick first to avoid doing that because Sloan was not eager to send warranty replacements.
After that, when I called Chambliss for some other different repair, Chambliss politely informed me that I was no longer in their "service region." That was when I sought another plumbing company, and after trying a few others on occasion, ended up with Primo Plumbing which is the sister company of Comfort Air, the company who installed my Carrier Infinity Heat Pump (no other company it seemed was interested in installing anything but a lower end heat pump, at most 2 speed). And Primo has always done well by me ever since. They installed the Champion 4 Pro toilet I have used since 2020, which I have always fixed myself (but it's another long not entirely happy story I don't have time to tell now). Except they don't do drain work.
So, with great trepidation, I called Chambliss. And lo, they agreed to do the drain repair for me. They sent out Aldo, one of their master drain plumbers.
Aldo repeated the Hydrostatic Test and got the same result. Then they did a Pinpoint Leak test which determined that the leak was 5 feet underneath my slab. The cost to fix would be $4000 ($800 per foot underneath the slab). Since I did the repair I did not have to pay for any of the testing.
Sadly, when the repair was done, my drain continued to fail the Hydrostatic Test. So this time Aldo did a more complex version of the pinpoint leak test, this time using a video camera. And for some reason he also got up on the roof to send the camera down the vent for the plumbing system.
This time Aldo discovered I had a second leak in the plumbing associated with the washing machine drain. This seemed quite plausible to me as I'd always noticed some rippling in vinyl plank flooring in the hallway just a few feet away from the Washing Machine standpipe (but, as I learned later, possibly 6 or more feet from the actual associated plumbing, which is mostly right above the main drain on the other side of the laundry room.). That would require another 14 feet of drain repair. Aldo said that would cost another $12,000 to fix. He asked me very humbly if I wanted to go ahead with that.
I felt I needed to. That was probably a long standing problem, explaining the rippling in the floor. So I'd probably need to go ahead and fix it.
Thus, a fairly "small" $4000 drain repair became a very large $16,000 drain repair which took over a month to complete. Excavators dug a human walkable tunnel underneath my house starting at the cleanout next to the front door. The soil they removed created an enormous mound mostly piled on the front lawn (they also took some of it away with them, which I told them not to do again) for almost 20 feet and about 4 feet high and 6 feet wide.
I began to fear that my house foundation would collapse from having so much soil removed from underneath it. But they assured me it was safe. I'm think it was probably helped by having two 25 deep foot foundation piers on either side of the excavation in front, though no piers exist currently inside my house. I moved all the heavy items I could (books in bookcases) away from the center of the house to be more safe. There was no sign of serious issues in need of repair* inside the house, but ultimately the front walkway started to tilt and ultimately pulled away from the small square piece in the corner Baird had put there above the foundation pier Baird has put there, leaving about a 1/2 gap around the piece there, and a slight depression as the tilted walkway now rises up slightly on that side.
(*Maybe a few small hairline cracks in the wall at ceiling level, but I think most if not all of those cracks had preceded the drain repair and were related to the foundation issues I wanted to have fixed, which is another story.)
Aldo impressed me as a very serious and competent plumber. Once the excavation was done, all the main drain pipe back to the leaking zone was replaced. One or more of the riser pipes up to the foundation fixtures were replaced too, such as the riser pipe to the hallway bathroom toilet.
When it came to the final leaking zone, however, it was not possible to replace the entire riser pipe, because it want above the foundation into the wall behind the laundry room. So, instead, a new partial riser pipe from the drain was connected to it somehow.
The City Inspector was not going to go down into the tunnel and observe all the new plumbing, so instead Aldo took a video camera and made a video of it.
Finally another hydrostatic test was performed, and now the plumbing system passed.
But that was not the end of it all. The backfill needed to be done. The excavation crew returned and shoveled as much of the soil on my lawn back into the tunnel. One member of the crew did this from down inside the tunnel and the others shoveled the soil down to him.
This process began in the morning as I was barely awake and it woke me up. The noise inside my house was incredible. It sounded like all the pipes inside my house were being pounded with rocks, starting in the laundry room and going forwards. I was scared, very scared, that all the meticulously rebuilt plumbing would be shattered.
I spoke with the excavators who told me there would be excess soil left over because they could never get all the soil back into the tunnel. I showed them where they could put it around the house foundation and my big storage building in the back yard, where there had been settling after the first phase of foundation repair 3 years earlier and considerable erosion around the storage building. We agreed on a payment, I recall it was either $150 or $300, for them to distribute the soil and they did a very nice job, nicer than when the foundation work was done originally.
I'm not sure if I mentioned the noise. I didn't want to dissuade them from doing the best possible backfill job, leaving no gaps under my house.
Then Chambliss sent the $!6,000 bill. I called Chambliss and asked if they'd do another hydrostatic test after the backfill, I was worried about it because incredible noises were being made. Chambliss said they never did that, and it wasn't necessary. I called Primo Plumbing and asked them if they would do a hydrostatic test. They said they did not do that, because they did not do drain work themselves. I worried about the cost of doing a hydrostatic test on my own dime, and I wasn't sure I trusted any other plumbers, so I let the matter drop for the time being. I felt safe because it stated right on the contract there was a 3 year warranty. Perhaps Chambliss was right, it wasn't necessary to do a hydrostatic test after the backfilling.
But I worried about it ever since. Over time I noticed additional bumps in the vinyl plank flooring where there were bumps before the plumbing work, and I never stopped worrying that the drain repairs had been ruined by the backfilling.
When inspecting my house for the foundation repair rework a year later, Daniel from Baird also noticed those bumps. I told him "it had bumps there before."
But this motivated me to do another hydrostatic test. I looked online and found a company, The Bearded Plumber, who would do hydrostatic tests for $99. So I called them.
This time I watched the plumber, a fairly young man actually (though with a beard). He ran the water in the hallway tub for 30 minutes "to fill the plumbing" he said. Finally he stopped and the water went down pretty fast. He recorded that with his phone. (On the receipt, it says "12 inches.")
During the test, he checked that the ball in the cleanout was blocking water. There was some water beneath the ball but it was not moving. The plumber said that was normal.
I was nearly holding my breath the entire time, but finally I got the verdict. My drain did not pass the hydrostatic test. We made arrangements for the Pinpoint Leak test for the next week. He offered Thursday but I hoped to watch a movie with my friend on that day (which didn't happen) so the Pinpoint Leak test was scheduled for Wednesday on the following week. He offered 8 am but I worried I'd need to use the toilet that early, so it was scheduled for "10-12." He said the test would last 2-4 hours and I asked if they would break for lunch if it took more than 2 hours. He said no, and they usually got it done in about 2 hours.
After the Hydrostatic Test I started having some very bad feelings about this. I didn't remember any other plumber running the bathtub for 30 minutes, though I hadn't been paying attention. I would have though 5 minutes sufficient to fill the plumbing, but online sources said it was generally done in 15 minutes (just like the plumber said) but sometimes as long as 45 minutes.
I have a small house and the hall bathtub has a vintage 1983 Moen valve that probably lets more water through than most, I figured. It sounds like Niagra Falls when it was running. I worried that all the excess water while the plumber was "filling the plumbing" was leaking out through the leak, possibly doing more foundation damage in one day than a whole year of leaking drain, because it was all being done at once.
I resolved to test my bathtub faucet to see if it was putting out way more water than most. I'd see how long it actually took to fill the bathtub to the overflow drain. But the only bathtub stopper I could find wasn't big enough. So I ordered one on Amazon. This was Sunday morning and I wanted to run the test right then to see if my fears were justified. Amazon gave me two options, normal delivery from 5-10pm, or drone delivery by 10:30 am. Both options were Free Delivery. I had always avoided drone delivery because I don't like the idea of drones. But this was urgent, I didn't want to wait until 10pm to do the test. I might put it off to Monday or not get it done at all before the plumbers returned for the pinpoint leak test, so I chose Drone Delivery.
As the time approached, I waited in my garage so I could see it happen. But it kept getting delayed so I finally put a chair in my shaded front walkway to watch. Finally it arrived around 11:15 am. I first heard a buzzing which sounded like bees. The the palm tree leaves started shaking, and dust was being thrown up. I started my camera to make a video, and meanwhile watched the drone drop a medium sized package (about 10x8x5) from about 10 feet. Then it took off. The fairly large package (containing just a 1 1/2 inch bathtub stopper) rolled off my driveway into the street gutter, and I retrieved it.
Afterwards I watched the video on my phone, and it cut off just when the dust was being blown. I never got a picture of the drone at all. While holding my phone, and trying to get a view with my own eyes at the same time because I wasn't seeing the drone at all at first (it came from behind) I had accidentally pressed the stop button. I checked my security camera video and found it did not have a picture of the drone at all because the drone was too high up. But it did show the package dropping and rolling into the street gutter.
The large package had extra reinforcement inside too. All to protect a small rubber bathtub stopper, which of course was entirely undamaged by being dropped.
I then got to performing the test, and it showed I could fill the bathtub in about 10 minutes. And I looked online and found that 5 foot bathtubs like mine generally hold 40-50 gallons of water. So that meant that the plumber had run 120-150 gallons. Meanwhile, plumbing in a small house like mine only holds about 30 gallons of water. So that meant that about 90-120 gallons must have been leaked under my foundation. Just over two bathtubs of water. That probably wasn't as terrible as I feared. I also determined that the flow rate of my bathtub faucet was around 4-5 gallons per minute, which is about average, nothing special. I did not need to worry that my bathtub faucet was different from what the plumber had experience with.
Still, I didn't like the idea of leaking that much water under my foundation, and all at once. They always say that a hydrostatic test does not put any extra pressure on your pipes and will not harm your plumbing. But they never advise that it may put a lot of extra water under your foundation, more than you might put there in a year of living with a slightly leaky drain.
The two plumbers that came for the Hydrostatic Test seemed older and more experienced. They never ran the bathtub faucets very long. They moved their ball through the plumbing and watched the result on video. Finally, they determined the source of the leak was the zone that contained the washing machine, about 12 feet from the back of my house.
I asked one plumber if they could see any leak in the main drain pipe. He answered fairly ambiguously "we couldn't see that." I asked a lot more questions. Finally what I gathered was this: the leak was most likely in the riser pipe rising from the drain and going up to the washing machine. It could be a crack, a hole, or a gap. He said that if the drain were ever blocked, drain water would build up to that point and leak.
So now I'm beginning to understand the Hydrostatic Test. It says nothing about how MUCH your drain is leaking in ordinary usage. It finds all the faults in your plumbing below the slab level, including faults that only occur if your main drain is plugged (as used to happen to me every now and then, before I removed all the plants that could be getting roots into my drain from some small hole in the drain pipe in the yard or otherwise).
But I haven't had a main drain blockage in many years now. I did have a bathtub clog that got stuck and held a bathtub full of water that I was hoping it would flush down. That time, the bathtub held water for nearly an hour, because a hair clog blocked the main drain pipe for that long. Finally it went down slowly. When I called plumbers out (it was Primo) they found the clog caught in roots near my cleanout value. Then, they ran the router into my house just a bit, but afterwards said since was a 4 inch router instead of the 2 inch they normally used inside house plumbing. "But it was probably ok," they said.
That was when I discovered that the potted plant nearest the front door had sent a root into the ground and that was what was probably infiltrating my drain pipe. From then on, I've put large potted plants on top of pavers to be sure they don't do that, and I've had no more root problems.
I began to reason that if a riser pipe has a crack or a small hole it is probably of very little consequence in normal use. Water keeps going down through the pipe rather than leaking out. It's only when when the drain is backed up that it becomes an issue.
But you could still have a real problem if there was a fairly large "gap" that water might leak out in ordinary use. And the worst case would be when there was not only a gap but a misalignment between the upper and lower parts of the riser pipe. The the water that goes down your fixture might not make it into the drain at all, but just flood the ground under the foundation.
It was maddening, I was beginning to think, that the Hydrostatic Test doesn't tell you anything about the cause of the leak and/or how bad it is. I resolved to do a different kind of test, a Hydrodynamic Test, to see that water running down the fixtures inside the house actually makes it to the drain. That's really the important thing. How much drain water is actually going down the drain. If there is a misalignment, nearly all the water would be going into your foundation and none into the main drain pipe.
To do this test, I ran the washing machine on the Quick Wash cycle (with no actual clothes in the washer, which is not generally recommended but my intelligent washer seems to handle it ok, I do this every now and then as a quick substitute for the Drum Clean cycle) and watched the drain water through the cleanout. It was clear that washing machine water was making it into the main drain. It flushed some shit that was sitting there from my having had a crap an hour earlier. I figured this took more than the 1.6 gallons the toilet was using, and probably several times more. That would mean there was something like 3-6 gallons going down the drain. Then I asked Google a bunch of questions (at first it gave me answers like "you should not do that") and finally determined that an LG washer like mine run with no clothes on the quick wash cycle would be using about 4-6 gallons, which is right in line with what I subjectively observed through the cleanout.
So it's clear that the washing machine water, at least most if not all of it, is going down the drain. The riser pipe is not misaligned, the worse case scenario. It might have a small gap, hole, or crack but since water goes down it would be of little consequence most of the time, unless the drain was backed up.
I also tried the sinks and bathtubs, and in every case saw water normally going down the drain. Often I could hear it too, just like you would imagine. I could not hear it very well through the master bathroom sink, but that is probably because (as Chambliss told me) the main drain pipe in my house doesn't uniformly go down the way it is supposed to, there is a high spot near the washing machine, then the pipe goes in the wrong direction (and traps some water in normal use) on the west side of the house. However, both the pinpoint leak tests done by Chambliss and by The Bearded Plumber showed no hydrastatic leakage in that region. So when I run water in the master bathroom sink, it first mixes with that trapped water until it builds up high enough to start pouring down the drain. Nevertheless, shit from the master toilet, the one I normally use, generally makes it all the way out pretty quickly (since I saw it in the cleanout during my Hydrodynamic Test, and I had used the toilet only twice before that at most).
The Bearded Plumber gave me an estimate for fixing the problem. With an applied discount, it would cost $6800 to excavate 12 feet in from the rear of the house (the opposite direction that Chambliss had done a year earlier) and fix the drain in the zone including the washing machine drain. I declined the offer. I didn't tell them that I'd spent $16,000 to fix that very zone the previous year, but including other issues and starting from the front of the house (18 feet). 18 plus 12 equals 30 feet, the total depth of my house (not including the attached garage).
Now I have a quandry. I could call Chambliss and see if they would honor their 3 year warranty on plumbing. For sure, they'd require me to pay them to do the Hydrostatic and Pinpoint Leak tests all over again, as plumbers never trust other plumbers in these regards. At best they would tell me they would waive those charges if I chose to pay for the repair, or have it done if it was covered by warranty. They might come up with some reason the warranty was inapplicable (such as earth movement, or the fault occurs higher up in the riser pipe than the part they repaired, though I thought they told me they were responsible now for that entire "zone" all the way up to slab level). And they would want to do a warranty repair in the cheapest possible way, probably starting from the back of the house now because that is the shorter distance, and the problems they fixed in the front of the house have remained fixed.
And I have issues with that kind of repair. If they tunneled in from the back, that would be right next to a foundation pier I think that Baird did incorrectly. It goes only 10 feet deep, whereas most of the piers around my house are 25-35 feet deep. I worry that pier that only goes 10 feet deep might fall or collapse if tunneling were done close to it, leading to cracking my entire foundation. Even if the pier does not collapse, the hot afternoon sunlight would dry out the backfilled dirt after the work is done. And I'd have a backfilled tunnel now running the entire length of my house, and probably going past a big footing that I imagine being about, well, 18 feet from the front and just where the washing machine zone is (which serves as a kind of fulcrum, which is perhaps what led to there being a leak there in the first place).
I don't even think I'd like it much if they dug out the 18 foot tunnel from the front again. I worry there's only so much insult my foundation can handle. Even though the fill soil there is far less dense than the soil under the rest of my foundation, once again they'd probably not get it all back in again, so it would be even less dense than it is right now, having been lightened twice.
I think that if the leakage only occurs when the drain is backed up, that's really not such a big deal by comparison. And even if a little leakage is occurring all the time, how can that be such a big deal? I have resolved to do only one load of laundry every day, that's not very much water even if it all leaked out which clearly it is not. And if I try to do one load every day, that would keep the moisture level fairly constant too.
And then, even if a warranty repair were done, how long is THAT going to last, especially if some of my foundation piers were installed incorrectly and will continue to sink over time, just as if I had not done foundation piering at all.
I don't have a good feeling about these under slab drain repairs at all now. Houses here should have been built entirely differently here, either on raised piers (like old fashioned houses) so you could repair the drains and everything without doing excavations under the load bearing parts, or with drain basements so you could even go down and see the drains yourself. I note that many years ago the founder of the scientific institute where I worked developed a method of pneumatically raising concrete foundations so they could rest on above ground piers. Perhaps he had some bad experiences with under slab drain repairs too.
A little bit of water periodically released under a slab foundation might even be beneficial, if it was only a small and fairly regular amount. It might help keep the soil under the house, and perhaps just beyond, from fully drying out.
It might be better just to leave everything alone at this point. I'd bet that most houses around me for hundreds of miles around me would fail a hydrostatic test by 20 years after construction, if not earlier. And most people don't know about these leaks because they are not required to do regular hydrostatic tests.
There's also a possibility that The Bearded Plumber who did the hydrostatic test didn't do it properly, and there is no hydrostatic leak at all. It's still hard to believe that over two bathtubs of water leaked out in 30 minutes, while as far as I can tell most drain water is actually going down the drain normally.
So, at this point, I'm thinking I might just be better off leaving everything alone. I just wish I'd decided that before signing up for the extra 14 feet of drain repair last year which cost me $12,000 and left me with a tunnel filled with looser back fill more than half of the way across my house. THAT was my mistake. Aldo asked me if I wanted to go ahead with that, and I should have said no, just as I said no to The Bearded Plumber.
I'd probably had that original drain leak for a couple decades before Chambliss fixed it. The leak might be slightly worse now than it was before Chambliss repaired it, but still not enough to justify all the work and potential foundation damage from fixing it again.
Though I do sometimes worry now that my house will one day collapse into a sinkhole because of drain leaks.
This is part of a larger story in which I spent over $30,000 last year to fix foundation and drain issues which were not actually causing me any serious trouble, and the issues have both returned in the year since they were supposedly fixed. There seems to be a lesson here, like "if it isn't badly broken, don't fix it." And that's regardless of what plumbers, home inspectors, and others tell you that you "must" do. I'm sure I made the wrong choices last year, the trouble I faced was trivial and hadn't amounted to much in the 43 years since this house was built. And the $30,000 cost has set me back for a long time. But the main question now is, did the repairs actually make things so much worse that my house won't last anything like that going forwards? I now worry about my foundation splitting or collapsing into a sinkhole, which never happened before. But nothing seriously bad has happened in the first year since the faulty "repairs." So I try not to worry about it much.
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