I rented a drain auger (snake) from the hardware store—a 100-foot heavy-duty one with a corkscrew tip. A hand-crank snake is fine for a sink, but for a 4-inch sewer line? You need power. I fed the cable into the cleanout, cranked the handle, and felt it slither 30 feet until… thunk . The cable stopped dead.

The jetter had blasted through a plug of wet wipes and congealed grease the size of a raccoon.

I ran to the street and popped the cap off the cleanout —that white PVC pipe sticking out of the ground near the foundation. When I unscrewed the lid, dark water rose to the rim but didn’t overflow. Good. That meant the clog was downstream, between the house and the city main. If water had spewed out like a volcano, the clog would be inside the house—a much harder fix.

That’s when I switched tactics. A friend with a pressure washer had a —a thick rubber tube with backward-facing nozzles. We shoved it into the cleanout, turned the water on full blast, and listened. For thirty seconds, nothing happened. Then, a deep, sucking glug-glug-glug . The water level in the cleanout dropped like a drain unclogging.

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