We were on vacation for 9 days and arrived home to discover our septic system had frozen! Our lovely memories of the beyond-beautiful Southern Caribbean vanished. Fortunately, we discovered this problem Very Early when we heard a strange "glub, glub, glub" bubbling sound in the toilet, and recognized what that meant--something BAD! We had no actual sewage backup into our home, thank heavens!! We tried contacting several septic services. Smilies Sewer Service was the first to return our call. The initial Smilie representative (a driver) referred me to his boss after hearing details of our problem. Mr. Smilie called back immediately. He listened carefully, asked questions, and ultimately walked us through exactly what we should do to solve our frozen septic pipe mess. Because of our older septic system NOT having the cement cover on ground level, only a 4" pipe and cover is sticks up, and using their steam-melting system was worrisome to him and not an option due to concerns that the heat could damage the PVC joints. He asked if we were "Do-it-Yourselfers", which we 100% are, and then told us how we could thaw it from the inside of our house (only other option) where the main sewer line exits out of our furnace-room, as long as we didn't mind using a slow tedious messy process. He said he could almost guarantee that we could thaw out our lines and solve our problem--assuming it isn't a total system failure (frozen drain field or something). Mr. Smilie said he had another customer with the identical problem a few days earlier, and that person successfully cleared out the frozen blockage in about 3-hours. We followed his instructions and used 60 feet of garden hose, a fireman's nozzle at high power stream, and connected it to our closest hot water source, the outlet of our water heater. We pushed the hose into the main pipe as far as possible and turned on the water at the hot water heater outlet, eventually water started pouring out of the main line into our 55-gallon plastic garbage container. When the garbage can was about 1/3 full we turned off the water flow at the water heater and wheeled the container on a dolly and dumped outside, using a smaller plastic container to catch the residual dripping. Then we started again, with the big garbage can under the pipe, turned on the water, and slowly pushed the hose forward as the ice melted; Over and over and over again. We knew the hot water finally broke through the ice when no water backed up out the pipe into the garbage can and we could suddenly smell the septic tank odor. We replaced the big valve onto the main sewer pipe line and started using toilets, the dishwasher, the washing machine and the shower again! Smilies Sewer Service took a great deal of time to help us even when their was no financial benefit for them. We are very grateful and extremely satisfied customers!