Our basement drain was backing up. Mr. Rooter's technicians determined that it was basically an outdated trap on the outside of the house, common to older houses.
The job required digging out eight feet worth of soil and replacing our trap with a modern one (pure Greek to me, but this is the general idea). And cleaning out the pipe.
The quote of $1,900 sounded high to me so we immediately went online and did some searches. There was one Global TV horror story about exactly the same job by this company, so we said we'd think about it. They didn't pressure us unduly. We did a further search including here on Homestars and satisfied ourselves that this company does thousands of jobs like this and does them well.
There was one minor snafu where they left the cap off one drainpipe that could have allowed sewage to go everywhere.
Other than that, the job was well done and I have noticed that a major change is that our bathroom sink drain no longer backs up, and we are talking about the second floor of a very tall Victorian, so that's a long way from where the major problem was. I guess things were pretty clogged.
It's pure Greek to me, as I said, but they finished the job quickly in one day and did not leave a mess, so we're glad we went with this company.
