Long story short, after a few valiant attempts at determining the problem (for starters the backflow valve was missing the valve part - apparently they come unscrewed and get washed away), I acknowledged this was beyond me. I did however, buy a new backflow valve and a plumbing snake - these are great for cleaning out drains in the house (they are not much good once the problem is further down the line). They do have one major drawback - after boring through whatever is clogging your drain, you have to pull all that wet messy line out and then put it away somewhere - YUCK. So I came up with a clever and simple storage facility. An ice cream pail.

Cut a hole in the lid, feed the snake in and coil it up inside.

By the way - the professional arrived a couple hours later with a much larger, powered snake and blade. After an hour or so of feeding it back and forth through the sewer to the street, he had amassed quite the pile of tree roots.

I have an ugly poplar tree on our front yard. See, 30+ years ago the city developers figured these fast growing trees were the perfect thing to quickly provide foliage to new neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, these trees are notorious for converting their anchor roots into a fine mesh of feeding roots when they encounter leaking sewer pipes. In the past 40 years, Winnipeg has gone from 2 or 3 companies that clean roots out of sewers, to over a dozen. The guy who did my house says they respond to 20-25 calls per day!

So the logical answer is get rid of the tree right? Not so fast. Even though it is on the grass between my house and the street, it is not mine. It is the cities. And they won't cut them down. Instead they will graciously reimburse me for 50% of my bill up to a $50 maximum and only once per year. Not bad, except these bills tend to be $140-170 plus taxes. So in the end the city barely covers 25% of the cost for a problem they created.

Another alternative is to replace the sewer line from the house to the city line - that is if I don't plan on sending my kids to collage and wish to live in debt forever. Thanks a lot.

Any way, that was how I spent the day. At least I ended up with a small hack.