Salmon Swimming Upstream - Blocked Sink

One of my specialties is dealing with blocked waste disposal units or insikerators. I attended one such call on Monday afternoon.

The offending blocked sink was in a new development near London Bridge. The man of the house had prepared a salmon dinner for his wife, which I'm sure went swimmingly. But it would appear that he over catered or one of them just didn't like the meal as there was obviously quite a bit of salmon left. Instead of disposing of the left over salmon in the bin he decided to push it down the insinkerator plug hole to be mashed up and sent out to sea.

Unfortunately a few big chunks of salmon managed to escape the thrashing blades of the waste disposal unit and traveled down the sink waste pipe almost intact only to become lodges in one of the numerous right angled bends as the waste pipe weaved its way out of the flat. Once the pipe was blocked all that followed had nowhere to go but back up the insinkerator chamber and into the sink.

As most men do when they encounter a blockage, he tried to clear it himself; in this case he had removed the u-bend connected to the waste disposer and emptied it out. But unfortunately the chunky salmon was further down the pipe. He then reassembled the u-bend and poured a very high concentration of caustic soda down the sink. This didn't move anything.

When I arrived the blocked sink was full to the brim with water and caustic soda. I decided to turn the insinkerator on to see if it was still working. I flipped the switch and it started humming away, ten seconds later there was a pop and a whoosh and I found myself standing in a puddle of water. By turning the insinkerator on I had caused the waste connector which had not been tightened up correctly to pop off letting the mixture of water and caustic soda out of its chamber into the kitchen cupboard and onto the kitchen floor. It was all hands on deck as I grabbed at a full bag of unused nappies and started soaking up the mess. Luckily the floor was linoleum so it could cope with the high strength alkaline solution that had just been poured across it. In fact by the time I had mopped the mess up the floor looked as clean as new.

I now turned my attention to the blockage. I decided the best way forward was to try retrieve the salmon rather than attempt to force it further down the waste pipe. For this I used a suction pump which creates a vacuum within the waste pipe and hopefully dislodges the blockage and brings it back the way it went down. After a few seconds I felt all resistance to the vacuum disappear. I poured the contents of the pump into a bucket and sure enough a big chunk of salmon floated to the top.