As luck would have it I finally got my heating issue fully resolved this morning. Of course my house is never one to let me have a moment of respite and before the HVAC guy even showed up this morning my plumbing had backed up into the basement again over the weekend. I had at first hoped that this would end up being a minor revist of the same issue I had back in June.
A quick call to the warranty company (ok these calls are never really quick) and I was able to schedule a plumber to come out today to deal with the backup. Luckily I'd already talked to my boss and pretty much wrote off making it into the office.
After some prodding, poking, head scratching etc the plumber got down to business and brought in the big drain cleaning machine and fired it up. Basically it was the same exact machine I'd dragged home from work over the summer when last I had this problem. After an hour of running it back and forth through the main line and cursing, he declared that things were bad. This wasn't just a clogged pipe but was most likely a broken/collapsed line.
As he said this and then started explaining things I stopped really hearing his words and what he was explaining sort of faded out to the waugh waugh sounds that Charlie Brown's teacher makes. Instead all I could hear was "Man you are fucked. But on the positive side I'm totally going to be able to make my boat payment this month."
After snapping back to reality I caught the last bit of "We can bring back a camera tomorrow and we'll camera the line to confirm and see if the line is broken and where the break is. Of course cameraing the line isn't covered by the home warranty so that's going to have to come out of pocket.
Stay tuned for more on this breaking news story.