I’ve got a bathtub that is totally clogged and it has water that has not drained since it was last used (yesterday) and I need to displace the water before I can pour one of those corrosive drain cleaners. How do I do this? It’s a pretty significant amount of water.
Use a length of hose. One end goes into the bathwater (fixed so it is at the bottom and cannot come out, and the other goes over the sill and out the bathroom window. Ensure the open end is lower than the end in the bath.
You will need to suck the end of the siphon to get water into the pipe and up over the sill - once you get it that far, water will continue to flow until the bath is empty.
You can buy commercial kits with hand pumps, which might be an idea if any chemicals have been added to the bathwater already.
Problem is, I have a windowless bathroom.
I used a pot to bail the water out, pouring it into the toilet. A bit messy and tedious but it worked.
Just take a bucket and transfer the water to the toilet stool. It doesn’t take that long. When you get to bottom you might have to switch to different scooping instruments or soaking water up with a bath towel (and squeezing it out of the toilet).
Another method is to use a toilet plunger on the drain.
It seems when I did this I also taped over the overflow hole.
Rent/buy a shop-vac. Use a bucket/pail/pot to get out the bulk of the water, and then the shop-vac to get the rest.
If a toilet/sink is nearby, the siphon method would be good.
Straighten out a wire hangar or braid a piece of firm copper or steel wire and make a little hook at the end or let the ends stick off parallel. See if that does any good, if not try using vinegar and baking soda, put it in the bottom of the plunger and tilt it in and plunge away, even if only a little bit gets in the drain in will create some air bubbles and maybe knock the clog loose… At least this way you can still siphon or bail water out safely as a last resort, with nothing toxic.
Hope it works out, I loathe plumbing issues.
-J
The few times this has happened to me, I’ve just used a toilet plunger. Always worked.
I would try (in order): toilet plunger, toilet plunger with hand pump, plumbing snake, chemical unclogger…
Never used a vacuum, but why not? I have physically displaced liquid.
Add more water.
A plumber taught me this trick. Could be worth a try. Screw off the shower head. Then place the shower hose on the drain, under water. Use a thin rag around the hose end, covering the drain holes and effectively making sure that the pressurized water from the hose will jet only into the drain, and with some force. Sometimes that water jet removes the blockage.
using a corrosive drain cleaner on a clogged drain is a very dangerous thing to do.
If it does not open the drain then you have dangerous chemicals in your pipes to deal with at the same time that you properly clear the drain.
Try a sealing a shop vacuum cleaner pipe to the drain and try to suck what ever is clogging the drain. Go to the hardware store and get a small snake. Chemicals are the last thing I would use.
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Look for a plastic drain snake. It’s a disposable plastic stick, with spikes on the side, which you can push into the drain, to ungunk it. Works well with hair, soap-leftovers. That kind of stuff. I keep them around and use them whenever my tub or sink starts draining slow.
Well I manually unloaded the water into the toilet as Der Trihs and PastTense suggested. I’ll take all other suggestions into consideration for future instances though, thanks.
Snnipe70E, why is using a drain cleaner a bad idea? It’s worked out for me in the past.
Yes, for future use, the Zip it is the ticket. 3 dollars at Home Depot. Reusable, but if you think the spectacular clots of hairy gunk too gross to remove, you can also throw the whole damn thing out.
It’s also usable while the water is standing in the tub.
Is the trap under the bathtub accessible? If so, it should just unscrew and open up the the drain lines … if not, maybe think about making it accessible …
Another vote against liquid drain cleaners … the stuff you can buy over-the-counter isn’t strong enough to clean out the drain line properly … it just pokes a hole in the clog and soon after it will just clog again … second, it won’t dissolve plastic or metal … like toothpaste tube caps, coins, packaging, knickers, etc etc etc … yeah, all things I’ve pulled (or pushed) out of drains using a snake …
Yeah, every few months I use this on the shower drain, and pull up giant slime encrusted hairballs like soapy dead rats. Works much better than chemicals, you’d need ludicrously strong stuff to dissolve hairballs.
That’s what I was going to say- the zip-its are cheap enough to be used as regular preventative maintenance.
Also, there’s some non-corrosive bacteria and enzyme based drain treatments that work pretty well to clear things out after you’ve used the zip-it to break the initial clog.
I’ve tried using a ‘zip-it’ on our deep sink, but, like everything else in this house, the plumbing is funky. There’s a 90º turn just below the drain that I could not get the thing past. Anyway…
I’ve had good luck clearing drains with a plunger. Mrs. L.A. likes to use drain cleaner, but I think I’ve alleviated that habit. The bathtub drain gets clogged with hair, where there’s that cross of metal. I just reach in with needle-nose pliers and pull it out. No more clog.
Because it does not always work.
The first drain line that I got stuck cleaning up after someone used drain cleaner has made me never to want to use it. Drinking fountain on the training ship clogged. 1st class decided to use a drain cleaner and it did not clean the clog. So they had to disassemble the drain line full of water and corrosive. Some of it splashed in the 3rd class midshipman’s eye and all over the engine room. After cleaning up that mess I was left with a respect for chemicals and when to use them. And over the years while working in the buildings I had to repair drain lines that corrosives had been used on. Read the label and see what is in that stuff.
I found a little implement the other day which is really good for fast and easy cleaning of sink type drains. Its sort of a miniature plunger, with a handle 10" long and with a plunger head several inches smaller than a traditional toilet plunger. Haven’t yet found a clog that it won’t clear, with no mess, snakes, or corrosive cleaners.
It’s manufactured by the Harvey Company, out of Omaha, Nebraska.