Need advice on fixing washing machine overflow

[Vicky01]

• older home with 1.5” copper piping
• Laundry ties into kitchen drain
• overflows from washing machine within 10-20 seconds
• Can withstand full pressure from outdoor hose for more than a minute before slowly overflowing. Will drain if allowed at a lower rate.

Have had multiple plumbers out who do not know what issue is. They’ve tried snaking but had trouble getting past the “T” elbow”.

Any advice or insight would be deeply appreciated thank you.

 

[breplum]

modern code for laundry is 2"
I personally have a 1-1/2" drain stubbed out at the floor framing that I put a 2" trap and standpipe on and it has worked for 30 years
Unfortunately you are going to need some plumbing change and your situation sounds like plumbing surgery, the degree of which depends on what piping you have.
Ultimately the solution is a 2" drain, which kitchen line should be too. though, we see old 1.5" copper drains for both from the bad old days.

 

[pasadena_commut]

• Laundry ties into kitchen drain
• overflows from washing machine within 10-20 seconds

The washer drains straight into a pipe?
Is there a utility sink nearby that it could drain into instead?

A utility sink holds something like 20 gallons, and that is more than most washing machines, certainly more than the new water efficient ones. Let's say the WM drains 10 gallons at each cycle. Even if the sink drain is slower than the current pipe it doesn't hurt anything to dump 10 gallons into the sink and then let that drain slowly, as long as it stays ahead of the water being added at the end of each cycle.

The main downside to going this way is that there needs to be a lint screen in the sink drain, or on the outlet pipe, and it needs to be cleaned regularly. Otherwise the sink may overflow at the first or second rinse.

Speaking of lint screens, if there isn't some sort of filter on the water coming out of the WM it is hard to imagine that the pipe wouldn't eventually get clogged up with threads and smaller fibers from the clothes that are washed. About 10X more likely still if the OP has a dog which sheds and has medium to long hair. When we wash the dog's stuff the sink filter looks like a dead rat afterwords. (Usually we take that stuff to a laundromat and wash it there.)

Also, did the washing machine used to drain OK, or is this a new WM? If the former that really indicates a clog of some sort.

 

[pasadena_commut]

Another possibility - your laundry detergent. Many years ago we tried using a powdered laundry detergent that came in buckets. I don't recall the brand. It cleaned well, but then the utility sink started to drain slowly and it would even back up to the kitchen sink. We had a company come out and rooter that line from the upstream clean out near the kitchen sink. According to the guy doing the work, it sounded like it was grinding through concrete, this was at a length of cable that put the position downstream of where the utility sink drained in. Stupidly we continued to use that detergent and this time the washing machine started throwing chunks of solidified detergent into the utility sink (where they were retained by the hair filter), while the drain only slowed up a little. Light bulb moment. We have really hard water, all that calcium and that detergent didn't get along. We switched over to a liquid detergent and no more "concrete" building up in the drain pipe. It did take a while for all the chunks of already precipitated detergent to work their way out of the washing machine.