A common service we often recommend to our customers is routine drain cleaning as part of your overall plumbing maintenance. Our plumbers will come to your home and use the best in current technology—such as a hydro-jet system—to thoroughly clear out the drainpipes throughout your household.
This removes buildup that leads to frequent slow and clogged drains, and also helps prevent your plumbing system from suffering other damage too. With winter almost behind us, why not make a drain cleaning appointment as part of your spring cleaning plan?
“Can’t I Just Use Liquid Drain Cleaner?”
Let us tell you something about these store-bought cleaning “solutions.” The thing is, they’re designed to rid your drainpipes of very specific clogs, such as hair. While this is one of the most common bathroom drain threats, which we’ll touch on more below, chemical liquid drain cleaners aren’t the way to go.
First off, they may not even remove the entire clog, so it will just build back up. Additionally, the ingredients in these cleaners are caustic, eating away at the plumbing and leading to eventual corrosion, which we’re certain you don’t want! The best thing you can do when you find yourself facing a stubborn clog that can’t be remedied with a good ol’ fashioned plunger and some elbow grease is to call a professional plumber.
In the meantime, we’ve shared below some of the most common threats to your bathroom plumbing, and what you can do to prevent clogs.
Hair
As promised, we’ll talk about hair first. Your bathroom sink drain and especially your shower drain are susceptible to clogs from hair. It catches easily in the curved pipe section right below your bathroom sink—this is called the p-trap. When this occurs, it starts to catch other hair follicles.
Eventually, a tangled clog will close off water flow, and this can resist plungers very well.
Drain covers are a great way to help stop hair form going down the drain! You can find mesh, metal, or even rubber drain covers that will do the trick.
Beauty Products
More and more individuals are turning to oil based cleansers and self-care products such as coconut oil for teeth whitening and facial lotion or bath bombs for softer and healthier skin. These are all great, but can do a number for your drains!
This is particularly true if your home suffers from hard water, which is water with a high level of minerals like calcium and magnesium—minerals that make it hard for even soap to break down as it flows down the drain, let alone oil-based products. It’s worth mentioning here that soap scum is another common threat, for this very reason. A water softener can certainly help with this!
What happens is that unless you’re using very hot water, these products don’t get flushed fully down your drainpipes. Instead, they go partially down, stick to the walls of the drainpipes, and harden once they cool off. Then when you use that beauty product again, the same thing happens until it builds up into a stubborn clog.
Just like with hair, the best way to combat this is with a drain cover. Simply wait until the drain cover dries and wipe off and dispose of the residue left behind by your product in the trash can.
To get in touch with quality plumbers in St. Charles, MO, reach out to Performance Plumbing today!