Our sewer overflowed into our backyard

This is story of a one day adventure, and what we did to fix it (in case you are Googling this page and our experience might help you)

10am: I found that a piece of solid waste (poop) was floating at the top of our sewer drain! That's not good. And other people have spent thousands of dollars fixing problems such as these.

I asked our neighbors, the Wards, what I should do. They own a plumbing company, so they were very helpful. He told me to try to manually unclog the open sewer access pipe.

What's abnormal about our situation is that our sewer drain access pipe wasn't covered. It should be covered.

11am: I start breaking up the clog in the drain. I loosen part of the clog and 20 gallons of human waste came out! It was so much I wondered for a moment if the city's sewer wasn't backing up into my home.

Water continued to flow out of the access pipe for another 20 minutes. We had a lot backed up.

12pm: Call for a plumber, but no one was available until later.

Here's what we did that worked

We went to Home Depot. The plumbing aisle guy guided us to tool rental, and we got a 100-ft "electric snake". It cost about $60 after tax, insurance and some gloves for 4 hours (only $20 more for 24 hour rental).

The machine twists a metal-pronged head as you feed it down the drain, breaking up clogs. It was totally awesome.

This is an image of what was clogging the drain. My theory is that it was a) hardened grease, b) a chemical/biological reaction that formed a styrofoam-like substance, c) couch cushions. One of my motivations for posting this is that I had a hard time Googling for other images/stories of drains getting clogged with a substance like this.

So in conclusion:

Is your sewer drain stopped up?

You may be in big trouble and have to have professionals remove and replace your entire drain.

But perhaps you can unclog the problem yourself. You'll need

an electric snake

gloves (layer vinyl/latex gloves under leather gloves)

a power cord to reach your backyard

and you need to

1. open the sewer access in the backyard
2. feed the electric snake into the sewer drain (hope it goes the right way, we had trouble with it going towards the house when we needed away)
3. perhaps your situation is that you have to feed the electric snake into the sewer drain for your house. Do more research, but you may need to remove your toilet and start feeding the electric snake for that point.
4. feed the electric snake down the drain while giving little pulses on the foot petal that controls the rotation of the cable
5. repeat a few times, then call a plumber/rooter company if you fail.
6. pray in the name of Jesus Christ. This is what worked for me! Thank you Lord.
7. cover the access drain back.

At the end: a clean drain! It worked!