Do you have a toilet that clogs a lot?
Do you have to not use your garbage disposal because it always clogs?
All of these are indications of a potential problem with your drain system and can be investigated and (usually) fixed fairly easily.
Everything that drains in your house drains – through something called a p-trap – into your house sewer system. The pipe where it starts is usually the smallest and, as that pipe joins to other pipes, they get bigger. The pipe that leaves your house is usually 3” or 4” pipe!
The drain for your kitchen sink and bathroom sinks typically connect with a 1-1/2” pipe, your tub or shower are typically 2” and your toilet is either 3” or 4”.
So, if the pipes are that big, how do you get a clog? Good question!
With most sinks, the clogs are going to be in the p-trap. This is underneath the sink and junk can settle into it and not get flushed down the drain. If enough junk gets settled into here, a clog will form and your sink will back up.
With a tub or shower, the biggest culprit is hair and soap scum. Hair catches on everything and the soap scum glues it together. Over time, these can form a nasty clog and really make your drain slow down.
With a toilet, the biggest problem is toilet paper. The p-trap for a toilet is part of the toilet. When you flush some solid waste and too much toilet paper, this is too much bulk to make it through the p-trap. Bingo, a clog! The most important thing?
DON”T FLUSH A SECOND TIME!!!!!!
Toilets are designed to hold all the water in the tank and not overflow. If you flush a second time, then the water goes all over the floor.
One note on toilets: don’t use them to flush things that you don’t want. Everything, it seems, gets stuck in a toilet. I’ve had toy cars, eyeliner pencils, bars of soap and GI Joe’s get stuck in toilets. In all cases, except the GI Joe, it was necessary to REPLACE the toilet! We could not get them out! Keep the lids down and your kids away!
Most of the time a clog in a sink or toilet can be cleared with a plunger. When this won’t work, that’s when you have to call me. Plumbers have machines call “snakes” that feed a stiff wire – ¼” – ¾” thick – down the pipe and rotate it as it goes. These wires (called "cabes" or "rods") have blades on the ends of them that help the snake dig. This will usually dig through a clog and break it up in the process. Then the weight of the water washes it away. Sometimes this process involves more than one size machine from more than one access point.
The thing to remember is that your drain system is designed to wash away liquid waste for the most part. The only place that is designed to handle solid waste is your toilet and it is designed to handle it with a lot of water! The larger your liquid to solid ratio, the better!
Just a note about garbage disposals – they are NOT designed for every piece of food you don’t eat or for when you are cleaning out your refrigerator! Here are the rules for using a garbage disposal:
1) Turn the disposal on first, before you put any food in!
2) The water MUST be running before you put any food into the disposal.
Note: it is perfectly fine to run the disposal without water; it will not hurt the disposal. The reason for the water is to rinse away the food, not to cool or protect the disposal.
3) Do not run the disposal when the sink is full of water. This will cause the pipes under the
sink to vibrate a lot and is very bad.
4) Put small amount of food into the disposal, not big hunks. Put the equivalent of about 2
mouthfuls in!
5) Let the food be ground up and washed away before putting in more food,
6) When you are finished, wait a few seconds after the disposal stops making grinding noises
before turning it off
7) Leave the water running for at least 5 seconds after the disposal is off.
If you have any plumbing problems, you can always visit our website and set up an appointment for us to come out and fix it. If you want to remodel, add a reverse osmosis system or softener, replace a leaking faucet or for any other plumbing issue.
Are you following the football season? There have been some interesting games so far! I am a huge Steelers and Patriots fan, but I love football in general. Just some of my thoughts on the season so far...
... who would have thought that the Titans would be undefeated after 10 weeks!
... It looks like Bill Parcells has made a difference in Miami!
... Detroit is off to another dismal start. The question is, is it more likely that Detroit will go 0 and 16 or that Tennessee will go 16 and 0?
... Mike Singletary needs to start thinking like a head coach and not a player. He really threw his Offensive Coordinator under the bus!
... Looks like Bret Favre could take the local Pop Warner team and make contenders out of them; not that I am saying the Jets are bad, it's just that Bret is so good!
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