We don’t live in a very new house. In fact, as much as I love our place, sometimes it feels like this 80s era brick one story is falling apart at the seams. So it wasn’t any surprise when when we started having a problem with our washing machine leaking about a week and a half ago.

“Leaking” isn’t really the word I’m looking for. “Dumping Niagara Falls on the floor” seems like a better fit.

We had an issue with our washer leaking from the bottom a few years ago when we lived in Long Beach. Different house, different (older) washing machine. As Josh and I talked about it, we remembered that snaking the drainage pipe (that the rinse cycle empties into) seemed to do the trick.

Josh got out his trusty 15 foot drain snake and went to work.

When that didn’t help, he bought a 25 foot drain snake.

When that didn’t help, we called the plumber.

The plumber came yesterday morning, and used a 75 foot drain snake. And that’s when he discovered the tree roots.

Oh, the tree roots.

See, we live out in the country outside of Savannah. Our water’s not hooked up to a city sewer network – it’s all septic tanks and moonshine out here. Thankfully, it was discovered that our washing machine was on it’s own little version of a septic tank. That’s good news, because our septic system’s all the way on the other end of the house, and it wasn’t going to take going through all of our plumbing ever to fix the leaking washing machine.

So here’s how our system works.

When water drains out of our washing machine during the rinse cycle, it goes through a pipe into a concrete reservoir in the yard. Picture a concrete box about 1 foot square. If you dig below the grass, you can pry the lid off and look inside. When you’re looking inside, you can see the end of the drainage pipe from the washing machine.

When that concrete holding cell fills up with water, there’s another pipe that the water flows into. It’s a big long pipe with lots of holes in it, and it disperses the water into the ground in the front yard.

The problem is… we have a couple of mature trees in the front yard. The roots from one of em found that holey water dispersing pipe. Those roots climbed right into the pipe and started growing. Over the course of time, they totally plugged up that pipe.

So the water couldn’t disperse into the ground under the front yard anymore. And the reservoir couldn’t empty. And the drainage pipe backed up onto our floor. Here’s a drawing of what I’m talking about:

How’d they fix it?

The plumbers spent the rest of the day digging out that huge holey root-filled pipe and replacing it with a new pvc one. Unfortunately, it wasn’t cheap, because the pipe was a long one, and they only had shovels to dig it out with.

We could’ve saved money by digging it out ourselves, but at 32 weeks pregnant I’m not really in a position to be doing that kind of manual labor… And not having a day off with Josh until Monday sort of throws a wrench in the works as well. So unfortunately we opted for the more expensive but faster option, to have them dig out the pipe for us.

Once the new pipe was in place, no more washing machine leaking on our floor. Hooray! Clean underwear for everyone!

So check out the roots that clogged up the old pipes – crazyness!

And here’s a bunch of huge root chunks they had to remove while they were digging out the old root-filled pipe:

We were hopeful that maybe our homeowners insurance would cover some of the expense, but today found out our policy doesn’t cover the plumbing and our deductible’s too high for them to help out in this particular case anyways. But maybe if I had told them the washer leaking from the bottom had ruined my priceless collection of Picrearos… Hmmmmmmmm…..

Have you ever had a problem with your washing machine leaking?

What was the cause, and how did you solve it? Share your experience in the comments so others can troubleshoot their own leaking machines!