Hi,
Newbie, beginning DIYer here, hoping I am in the right place for good advice!
I am a condo owner with kitchen sink drain problems. My one upstairs neighbor and I must have a shared vertical kitchen sink drain, because there's a clog somewhere beyond where our pipes join, and frequently I get water from his sink backing up into mine. I have had plumbers snake it, I've snaked it multiple times, used multiple types of enzymatic drain cleaner, which all work for some period of time but it always comes back, the latest was only 2 weeks apart. My only access point right now is through removing all 3 of the threaded joints under my sink and snaking it through this horizontal pipe.
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The last plumber told me, the way to really fix it is cut an access hole somewhere in the drywall and put in a Y joint to have easier access to use a bigger snake. Or I've been reading about hydrojetting which seems like it would do a better job of scrubbing the walls clean.
My questions are,
1) does that sound advisable to you?
2) where should the access point be? In my unit, but just above where our pipes join? In my neighbor's unit so we can clean out more of the vertical pipe? Neighbor is pretty agreeable and might let me put it in his, maybe .
I don't 100% know the layout of our pipes so I'd like to have some idea before cutting lots of holes in walls.
Thanks very much for any advice!

you should have the plumber send a small inspection camers down the pipe to find out why this problem reoccurs ?
otherwise its all guesswork.

When this happens in an apartment building, the tenants show the problem to the landlord and let him handle it (on a good day). You own your condo. What are the condo association rules about problems affecting two units? Do you handle it with your upstairs neighbor, or let them the association do it?

Looks like there is enough space under the sink to rework the garbage disposer drain and put in a inline cleanout. When snaking through a inline cleanout, water can be run to flush away all the debris being knocked loose.

When snaking after taking the drain apart, water cannot be run. Perhaps the issue is that the debris is not being flushed away.

to go along with george, you can always snake the way it is and have the neighbor upstairs trickle some water while the wire is spinning,

I got a small waterproof camera from Amazon and it shows that the horizontal pipe is reasonably clean, a little grease in spots but you can still see the white pipe walls all around. About 5 ft in is where I seem to hit the vertical pipe, whatever it is I can't make that corner, but I can see at that point it looks to me like solid black gunk on walls.

To answer the prior post above, if it's inside my unit it's my responsibility, not the HOA's.
Hmm I didn't think of having the upstairs neighbor run water while snaking. Worth a try. After I snake it myself (many times) I always run a couple kettles of boiling water down the drain to try and wash out the debris.
Can you explain more what you mean by inline drain? Google isn't helping me here...



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After you snake the drain, does it flow freely? If you filled up the sink and then removed the sink stopper, does the water drain normally?

I install cleanouts whenever I do a kitchen sink drain

After a snaking, it'll flow enough to drain a sink but I can tell it's still slow. And it still backs up again, in my experience anywhere from 2 weeks later to about 2 months later, depending on how well I snaked it, probably, haha.

Yes, that's the sort of Y drain access I was thinking of putting in, thanks for the pic. So if I put that under the sink, I could at least run water while snaking it. Would that be a good enough access port for a plumber to be able to hydro jet it from under the sink? If so, that would be a lot less disruptive than cutting a hole in the drywall to put one in our shared vertical pipe.

And my neighbor and I are both using sink strainers to prevent the biggest bits of food from going down, and he says he doesn't drain grease straight down the sink, nor do I. So I don't know what else we can do to prevent it.

I don't have any experience with hydro-jetting, so I don't have an answer to your question. Hopefully some one else will chime in.

First of all, it sounded like there is a blockage or a partial blockage that is persistent and will not clear, and even if you snake, it drains OK for two weeks and it's back, right? I say you have a blockage further down, that blockage is most likely in the drain you and your upstair neighbor share but since you are downstairs, any blockage will always be felt by you first. How many stories in this building? Do you have someone below you and if so is that person feeling the same issue?

Imagine a slimey grease ball with food debris may be rice pasta coffee whatever that's blocking a 3" drain, from the kitchen you send down a 1/4" snake and that small snake is not going to do much but punch a hole in that blob, Punching that hole allows it to drain better, sometimes breaking that block into two pieces even so with some water flowing it shifts position while you drain better and than at a further downstream location it forms the block again. You really need a full size head to snake that drain all the way to the city lateral. Is there a roof access that someone can use a full size snake from there all the way down?

You said anything inside it's your responsibility, I suggest you read the fineprint again. Most condo defines "your property" for a condo as the ceiling to floor, wall to wall. Meaning a wall cavity is not your property, in my experience wall cavities where electrical wiring plumbing pipes are routed are what may be called "Limited Common Elements". They do not belong to you but owned by the HOA but some of that space may be used by individual units out of necessity such as air conditioning compressors, electrical boxes etc...most of the time though, when an issue persist that is experienced by two of more units it is HOA responsibility financially.

About hydrojetting. I am not a pro but I have hired drain cleaning pros to do hydrojets a half dozen times. They go to a downstream cleanout, and they insert the jet head from there towards the house. The head has backward and forward facing nozzles and it spins. So when they push it upstream until they feel the blockage, the engage the jetting to shoot water upstream to break up the blockage, once broken loose they push forward past the blockage, then they turn on the backward facing nozzles and water shoots backwards and as the pull the pipe back to the cleanout, it is "swept" away from the house to the cleanout. Once past the cleanout, they push it further downstream with the forward jetting to keep rinsing and jetting to the city's lateral.

The problem with jetting is when you go from downstream cleanout, there is a chance as you go upstream you are pushing it further and further you could end up on a branch that merged into the main drain and you have no idea, when you turn the water on if it's very close to a fixture, you may see a geyser like you are in Yellowstone.