A customer's basement flood in Cincinnati taught me to check the drain hose first

I was on a call for a washer that wouldn't drain, and the whole laundry area was soaked. Instead of pulling the pump right away, I looked at where the drain hose went into the standpipe and found it was shoved way too far down, creating a siphon. What's the weirdest drain hose setup you've seen cause a problem?

3 comments

3 Comments

kim_nelson14d ago

Tie the drain hose too tight to the standpipe with a zip tie or clamp and you can actually crush it shut from the inside without knowing it. I pulled a machine apart once where the hose looked fine from the outside but there was a flat spot where the clamp was sitting. Water couldn't push past that pinch point so it just backed up and overflowed silently. Nobody ever thinks about the force those clamps can put on soft rubber when they crank them down.

abbyc333mo ago

Maybe not weird to you, @finley_bennett28, but a siphon flood is way more dramatic than a slow sloped pipe.

finley_bennett283mo ago

Honestly that seems like a pretty standard fix, not exactly weird. People shove those hoses way down the standpipe all the time. The real mess is when someone runs a drain line across the room with no slope and it just sits full of water. Now that's a problem.