Published April 2008

Great Grab!

By Jim Kneiszel (page 72)

To drain cleaner Allen Lewerer, quality service includes helping to keep marriages happy.

To drain cleaner Allen Lewerer, quality service includes helping to keep marriages happy. Lewerer, co-owner of Mr. Rooter of St. Croix County in New Richmond, Wis., made television newscasts and newspaper headlines by cleverly using technology to fish a customer’s long-lost wedding ring out of a clogged drain pipe.

Carey and Charlotte Moe called Lewerer to their home to flush a slow-draining sewer pipe. He cleared 60 feet of 4-inch cast iron pipe and flushed it with a hose to make sure it was clean. Then, examining the job with his MyTana color push camera with self-leveling head, Lewerer noticed what he thought was a scrap of copper pipe in the line.

Moe, looking at the same video picture, insisted it was the wedding ring that fell down the kitchen sink about 12 years ago. He told Lewerer he didn’t have to take any extreme measures to retrieve it, but Lewerer insisted on pulling the ring out.

Lewerer attached a 3-inch pigtail retriever to his MyTana M81 The Big Workhorse cable unit and sent it 32 feet into the pipe. Carefully twirling the retriever just in front of the camera, he hooked the ring with the pigtail bit and slowly pulled the camera and cable back.

He dropped the ring about halfway back and had to snag it again. Then, when he got to the vertical cleanout, he wedged the camera against the pigtail and lifted. “I knew that as soon as I lifted it, I would lose the ring,” he recalls. “So I pushed the camera against the retriever, lifting the camera and cable all up at once. I was going to try my darnedest to get it out.’’

The rescue took about an hour, and Moe was happy enough to give Lewerer a $20 tip. “He didn’t have to give me anything,” Lewerer says. “The biggest reward is being able to help a homeowner like that.”

Lewerer returned the favor with a $50 gift certificate to a local restaurant so the Moes could celebrate the rescue of the ring. “I thought it was appropriate to send them out to supper,” he said. For information on the tools Lewerer used, call 800/328-8170 or visit www.mytana.com.