hey guys bump here this video I'm going to show you how to unclog your main
sewer line or unclog your main drain so I've got an issue with tree roots in my
sewer line the reason I know that is I made a do it yourself sewer camera
and I was able to get footage of those those tree roots in my main line or in
my sewer line with that sewer camera I'll put a link to that in the
description below you can check out up here I'll put a link up there as well
but with the aid of that sewer camera I was able to see that do have an issue with
tree roots my sewer line so I am gonna rent a mechanical auger and show you guys how
to use that to to clear out your main line or to unclog your your sewer line
using that mechanical auger or a roto rooter (roto-rooter) so when you have tree roots
in your sewer the best thing to do is to remove those mechanically using a
mechanical auger or a mechanical snake so I'm going to do that today to unclog
that main drain or the the main line and then what I'm gonna do them a followup
with a chemical treatment to try to keep those roots at bay after I've removed
the the tree roots with the mechanical auger so I've rented this auger from the
fine folks at our local home improvement store I'm guessing you could probably
guess who that was but you can rent these guys from anywhere from 50 to 100
bucks I went ahead and rented this one for the day so I can take my time and and do
a thorough cleaning so I know exactly what the problem is you see I've got a
an access here just just in front of this this this auger this roto rooter (roto-rooter) so
I was able to to locate my problem with my sewer camera so I've got a big
maple tree here and just about 10 or 12 feet from that sewer access right in
this area here I've got some tree roots that are growing from that big maple
tree. So I am gonna get in and do a real thorough cleaning on those tree roots
and try to eliminate this problem for a at least for the immediate future and
then you know maybe somewhere down the road we'll do a repair on this the sewer
line all right let's go. so the the roto rooter (roto-rooter) or drain snake
that I'm using here is a general speedrooter 92R are so it's a
it's an auto-feed Rooter made for doing your main lines or cutting through tree
roots in your main sewer line I'll put a link in the description below if you
look at this little QR code here get full detailed instructions on how to use
this machinery so when you rent one of these mechanical snakes or augers it
comes with four different attachments so the first attachment is a Arrowhead or
spade head bit so this guy used for you know opening up and getting your your
water flowing again this one's a C blade so it's a little bit larger gonna
be used for for cleaning and finishing off your your cleaning of the pipe this
one's the more aggressive one so this one's me I get the teeth turn to the
side so this is gonna be used for cutting through roots so this is your
root cutter this guy's close to three inches in size
and then you've got the the retrieval tool used to retrieve objects whether its
you know root balls or clothing towels anything that might be blocking the line
so this guy will poke through it and it'll get caught in this this little
retrieval tool and you can retrieve that out of your line so I'm going to
start out with this Arrowhead bit I believe this guy's one and a half
inches wide so you see it's got four little blades there so not a lot of
cutting going on with this guy it's just mainly gonna poke a hole and get
especially with our roots just gonna poke a hole and get our clog undone so
this is a good one to start with so I am gonna give this guy a try first and get the
water flowing again when you're running your your drain auger your roto rooter (roto-rooter)
you want to have the this line stuffed as far down in there as you can and
have the machine as close as you can to the to your clean-out point that's to
prevent it from whipping around and you know
it hits some sort of obstruction you it can start to coil up and then spring back
and spring back an injury you so you know that's for your safety to have
that have that as close as you can to your cleanout and have that coil stuffed
down in there as far as you can you don't want it to flinging around outside
so the switch here this is the off position this is the forward position that's
where you're gonna run it I should run in forward and reverse in this position
but while you are you using machine this is the position the switch is going to be
in and if you get stuck you know on some roots or some object you can actually
run it in reverse but you just want to do that you know pulse it just for a
couple seconds at a time you don't want to run it for an extended period of time
in reverse so you just want to pulse that guy if you need to if you get stuck so
to start the rotation of the drum and the auger just step on the pedal and then to
stop it you just step off so it's a safety feature in a presence detection
tying to make sure that you're you're here with the machine when it's running and
rotating. To move it forward you have the lever down in this
direction clockwise. so guys it really is an easy job to rent your own sewer snake
and and do this job yourself you can do most of it with your foot on a pedal and
a beer in your hand and let the snake do do all the work with this auto-feed
snake if it really is easy. so now I got it broke loose I'm going to run some
some water in to continue to flush the line so again I just started with the
the small spade head first to get to get it broke loose and then I get the lane
I am gonna get the line drained out and then uh ... I'm just running here on neutral right now
where where it met that clog get it drained out and then I'm going to start to run
some water to flush out to flush out the line
I'm gonna switch heads and see if we can't get some of these roots out of
here all right water is flowing relax a little bit take a little sip of my beer
I'm gonna switch over switch the heads on the snake and see if we can't get get
these roots taken care of and get them cleared out of the line all right so
I've worked it until I met a good bit of resistance and got as many turns as I
could without it starting to really torsion up so I'm gonna try to remove
these roots out of here now hopefully be able to retrieve some of those here
we'll know in just a second. So that retrieval head is just starting to come back and it got to
where it was completely locked up no water flow and all of a sudden it just
completely broke loose like that the dams had broken wide opening so I'm
hoping to have a good bit of clog here I'm seeing some a little bit of roots on
the auger let's see yeah see what the head retrieves water is just gushing out now all
right so oh yeah let me get this up here
yeah so I, I know that that's not all of the roots in there but that's a good little
haul for the first go-around again this is only ten or twelve feet deep so I'm
gonna I'm gonna do this a few more times and see if I can dig some more these
roots out of here. so this time I'm gonna run that through there super
slow to get a real thorough job of trying to entangle as many of those
roots as I can in there and then I am gonna do the same thing when I do my final
cleaning I'm gonna run that as slow as I can. So I still have a little bit of resistance with that
retrieval tool on the way in and just a little bit on the way back so I may have
got a large majority of those that root mass out of there. get a look at it coming back
out here. So I am running the guy... So I'm running the snake in reverse here through the main sewer
line
see a little bit of root there on the auger so that was that was actually on there
when I rented the machine. Oh there it goes. And here it comes out of here.
So yeah its uh...get it pulled out here. so again it got a little bit more root mass but not nearly
as much as the first time. probably run this through one more time and then I am gonna
switch to that cutting tool. what I didn't want to happen was to run that
cutter first and then cut up a big bunch of root mass and then just for it to get
clogged up by further down the line so if you see here I've still got another
150 foot to the main sewer line at my house here my house sits back really far
off the road so I really don't want to just recreate that problem and move it
to move it further down the line here so you know I've got this access here but
it's another 150 feet to the main and I've only got a hundred foot of snake
here with me so I wanted to retrieve as much of it out of the line as I could
first and then I run the the cutter through it's at the end as the cleaning
more than anything I wanted to remove as much as that mass as I could with the
retrieval tool so sort of as I expected I ran the root cutter tool through the
sewer line and I didn't feel any resistance the whole way through so I'm
confident I got all of all of my problem roots out of the out of the sewer line
I'll be able to confirm that of course with my sewer camera that I'm gonna run
through it next and again there's a link to that video on how to make the the
do-it-yourself sewer camera (diy sewer camera) for really cheap I'll put a link to that in the
description below there's really three main ways to kill
roots once you've cleared a blockage those are gonna be copper sulfate rock
salt and a foaming root agent like rootx (RootX root x) I'll put a link to those in the
description below so rootx (RootX root x) is gonna foam up when it comes in contact with
water and coat the entire cross section of your pipe you know all the way up to
the top so if you notice in the video after I cleaned the roots you could see
where the roots were the roots were coming into the pipe around the top edge
of the pipe so the rootx (RootX root x) root X is actually going to foam up and completely coat the
inside of your pipe where some of the other products aren't really gonna reach the
top of your pipe so they really aren't gonna be effective until the roots make
their way down to the water the waterline of your sewer pipe so I really
hope you enjoyed the video I hope that it gives you the confidence needed to
tackle this project on your own uh I was a little hesitant myself to do it... uh have
used professionals in the past and honestly just wasn't pleased with the
results that I've got so I feel like I've got better results doing it on my
own for much cheaper again I was able to
build my own sewer camera and rent rent the device to clean out the roots for my
sewer for cheaper than I would pay a professional and probably did a much
better job so hopefully you have the similar results yourself hopefully gives
you the confidence you needed to do this project on your own if that is the case I'd
like to hear about in the comments below make sure to drop a comment. also give
it a thumbs up and that subscribe to my channel I've got a lot of other great
content on my channel I'd appreciate if you subscribe to my channel
you kidding me
[Jack] Uggh Ahhhh
really... and now a leaf blower