Nearly every house with a sewer line has a cleanout. Most owners have never seen theirs, and the night the drains back up is a bad time to start looking.
A cleanout is about as plain as plumbing gets. It is a capped fitting on your drain line, often half hidden, and it usually only gets noticed when a plumber asks where it is. On a wooded lot around Point Washington, where roots find their way into older sewer laterals and pine straw buries anything close to the ground, it is worth knowing about well before you need it.
So this one is short on theory. What the thing is, where it tends to hide, and the one mistake that turns a backup into a much bigger mess.
What a cleanout is for
Your drains are a tree of pipes. Sinks, tubs, showers and toilets feed branch lines, the branches join the main drain, and the main drain leaves the house as the sewer lateral. That lateral runs to the street sewer, a septic tank, or on low bayside ground a grinder pump basin.
A cleanout is a fitting on that system with a removable cap, placed where somebody can get tools into the line. It is usually a tee or a wye with a threaded plug on the open end. Take the plug out and there is a straight path into the main drain.
Without one, clearing the main line means pulling a toilet off the floor or feeding a cable down through a roof vent, and neither gives a good angle on the pipe that runs under the yard. With one, a cable machine or a camera goes right where it needs to, and nothing inside the house gets taken apart. That is why a missing or buried cleanout can stretch a simple drain call into a long one.
Where to look first
Cleanouts go where the line is easy to reach, so start with the likely spots.
- Outside near the foundation, close to where the main drain leaves the house. Look for a short white or black pipe with a cap, standing a little above the ground.
- Along the route toward the street, the septic tank or the grinder pump basin, where some houses have a second one.
- Inside a garage, set into a wall or the floor, especially where the main line runs out on that side of the house.
- Under the house, on homes built up off the ground with a crawlspace.
- Behind an access panel near a laundry or kitchen drain.
The outdoor ones are the easiest to lose. Pine straw, mulch and sod creep over a cap within a season or two, and a mower can clip one off at the ground. If you cannot spot it, walk the foundation below the bathrooms and kitchen and feel through the bed with your hand. When you find it, mark it and keep it uncovered.
Why find it before anything goes wrong
Backups do not keep office hours. When a tub is filling with sewer water, or every drain in the house has stopped at once, the first useful thing anyone can do is get into the main line, and that starts at the cleanout. If nobody knows where it is, the first stretch of the visit goes to hunting for it, digging through a flowerbed or opening up a wall.
Rentals and second homes have it worse. The person calling is often a manager or a guest who has never stood in that yard. If you own the place, find the cleanout once and pass the location along to whoever looks after it. A photo on your phone showing where it sits from a corner of the house is plenty.
It helps with planning, too. A cleanout that has ended up under a new patio or a poured pad is far better discovered as a note on a quiet day than during an emergency. When it is an emergency, our emergency plumbing calls in Point Washington start right at that fitting.
Never open it while the line is backed up
This is the rule that matters most. If drains are backing up, leave the cap on.
A cleanout is a door into the pipe. When the line is blocked further down, everything that has gone down the drains since the blockage is sitting in that pipe, and some of it sits higher than the cleanout. Loosen the cap and it comes out of the opening, and it keeps coming as long as there is water above it. Outdoors that means sewage in the yard. On a cleanout inside a garage wall, like the one below, it means sewage across the garage floor.
Old caps bring a second risk. A plug that has sat for years can seize, and forcing it with a big wrench can crack the fitting, which leaves an open pipe you cannot close.
So stop running water, hold off on flushing, and call. If you have a grinder pump and its alarm is sounding, the same advice holds, and our grinder pump alarm guide covers the rest.
What we do through it
Once the line is safe to open, the cleanout is where the work starts.
First we look at what is sitting in the opening. Sometimes the blockage is right there, like that wad of wipes, and it tells us a good deal about what has been going down the drains. Then a cable machine goes into the line to open it up. On a line with roots, heavy grease or a buildup that keeps coming back, a water jetter scours the pipe walls instead of just punching a hole through the middle.
With the line open, a camera goes in through the same fitting. That is how we tell a one-off clog from roots at the joints, a sag holding water, or a section that has broken apart, and it decides whether the visit was a cleaning or the start of a repair. If wipes were the cause, the lasting fix is in the bathroom, and our note on what not to flush applies to any sewer line. The rest of the process is on our drain cleaning page for Point Washington.
Questions about cleanouts
What if my house does not seem to have a cleanout?
Some older houses were built without an accessible one, and others had it buried or paved over later. We can still get into the line another way, often by pulling a toilet, but it is slower and gives a poor angle on the yard line. Adding a cleanout outside where the lateral leaves the house is a common, sensible repair.
Can I open the cleanout myself just to check it?
When every drain is working normally, loosening the cap to confirm it turns is fine, as long as it moves by hand or with light pressure. If it is stuck, leave it alone rather than risk cracking an old fitting. Never open it while any drain is backing up, because the water sitting in the line will come straight out.
Should the cleanout cap stick up above the ground?
Yes. A cap at or a little above grade is easy to find and keeps dirt and rain from washing into the line. If yours has disappeared under straw or sod, uncover it. If a mower broke it off or it was cut flush, a new cap or riser is a small job, and much better done before a backup than during one.
A cleanout is easy to find on a calm afternoon and miserable to find in the dark with water on the floor. Find yours, mark it, keep the straw off it, and leave the cap alone whenever anything is backing up.
Cannot find it, or already backing up?
Call 850-318-5777 and tell us what the drains are doing, or send a note and we will help locate the cleanout on a scheduled visit.