I'm Mr. Plumbah—that's who.
The sink was definitely clogged, of that there was no doubt. As the in-sink disposal tried to do its job thick plumes of water shot out in jets from the other basin.
It's not unusual for our sink to back up, while the disposal is very good it sometimes deposits thick chunks of fibrous materials into the pipe, which gets stuck in the y-shaped connector. (We learned this the first time we peeled a dozen carrots into the sink). This was something different though, as the dual-sink action indicated that the clog was somewhere forward of the y-connector which joined the two drains together. This would mark the start of the second odd thing to happen in the kitchen this week.
I despise getting under the sink and relieving the clogs, it's sort of a Greek tragedy version of a midwife's hell. Without fail I end up covered in long strands of carrot or celery, or worse. But I'm pretty good at it now, all I require is some dish gloves, a bucket, my drill and the wire snake accessory and I can usually clear the clog in a few gross minutes.
This time it was not to be. The clog was very far the line, at some point after the pipe had already dropped to the sub-flooring. The snake has some issues getting down past the few turns in the line, and it wasn't pulling up anything appreciable. In order to test my progress I had disconnected just the disposal line, the top end of the "y" that connects the drains. This way I could snake then cover the opening with my rubber glove, turn on the water and see if the drain would flow. It would not.
I turned online to see if there were any drain cleaners that work with PVC without rupturing them (there really aren't) and found out from Consumer Reports that in their test plunging worked as well or better than chemicals every time. The only problem here was that the open-end of the y-connector prevented the pipe from building up enough pressure to flush the plug.
I combined a suggestion from Consumer Reports for sinks with drain overflows (plug them with wet cloths) and an ingenious Glad-family-of-products freezer bag to fix this. I cut a piece of cotton cloth, soaked in and plugged the hole, then covered that with the Ziplock bag, sealing it to the pipe with the lock ring that had been connecting the pipe joint. Now I had a nice plastic and cloth seal to keep water from pouring out.
I grabbed the big powerful plunger we have (cleaning it off a lot with bleach) and went to town. One, two, three, four... no go. Sink still clogged. A dozen more times, nothing. Sweat began to drip from my brow and my arms got tired, but I was not going to have a plumber come out to charge me to do this same thing.
Finally with a few dozen repeat forces of the plunger, the sink broke free, and the water rushed out of the sink. I shouted with pleasure, all manly-like and reached under the sink to disconnect my makeshift cap.
Which is when I noticed that the cloth was gone. Vanished.
What I think happened is that the cycling of the plunger forced the cloth to get sucked downstream, and the plunging shoved it down the pipe, against the clog and forced that out of the pipe. That's also what I hoped happened.
At some point, there's going to be a very confused duck in the Hudson river, but at least he'll have his own bath towl.
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