Yep. Call the man.
Plumber is coming out today. Fingers (and toes) crossed.
If he did, then find another plumber.
Plumbers HATE Drano. It rarely fixes the problem and when the plumber is finally called, they will have to deal with something that is quite dangerous, as mentioned above. If he recommended using lye, he’s an idiot and should not be trusted. n.b. I am not calling you an idiot. This is a common mistake and I’ve done it too.
No, not really.
Bleach mixed with ammonia causes chloramines to be formed. A useful chemical, it is used to keep water supplies safe throughout the US. But, it is deadly to humans (and nearly every other living being) at high concentrations. Because chloramine gas is heavier than air, it can be difficult do dissipate, particularly in a small room, like a bathroom. As a gas, it’s bad stuff and you don’t want to be around it.
Mixing bleach with an acid releases chlorine gas. Also deadly and also bad stuff to be around.
The short and easy to understand take-away is that if you don’t know what the effect of mixing chemicals together is, don’t do it. Remember, water is a chemical, too. If you do mix stuff together and it foams up, gets hot, produces noxious fumes, or produces a precipitate, the safe thing to assume is that it is poisonous, flammable, or explosive, and get away.
The plumber came today. His snake seemed to reach a dead end, like a really hard obstruction. He couldn’t figure out how the pipe was configured, and said he’d have to explore it from behind. The problem is, there’s no accessible “other side of the wall” to get to, just an air shaft and the space beneath the stairs to the attic. So he suggested going up through the living room ceiling, which is beneath the bathroom. That would cost $1K-2K, not counting fixing the living room ceiling and molding. I told him “fuhgeddaboudit.”
Time for a second opinion.
Oh boy. I snaked out my bathroom sink drain recently. I also hit a solid dead end. After about a half hour of cursing and manipulating, trying slightly different angles and levels of force, I was all but resigned to call in the pros.
I gave it one last shot and it miraculously navigated and cleared the obstruction. I think my dead end was a 90 degree angle in the plumbing that I had to work past.
Good luck!
Y’all just inspired me to try a plunger on my slow draining bathroom sink. I had already tried enzyme stuff to no avail.
It worked! I can’t believe I never thought of the plunger. :smack:
Good luck with your bathtub.
Weird. I thought some pro snakes had cameras on them? I mean, if all he was going to do was run a snake down and throw up his hands when it didn’t work, you could have just rented one from Home Depot or the like.
Good luck. I had a non-draining tub I had to get a plumber out for. Found a child’s toy car in the pipe from the last tenant.
They do.
I just fixed one for my plumber.
Have you tried pulling the plug out of the drain?
I wonder if s/he’s the same plumber that recommended another poster bomb their drain with Drano? EDIT, not your guy beowulff; the clown ‘helping’ the OP.
Recently my bath was draining slowly.
I called my plumber, who came within 24 hours.
He checked the pipe, found a hairball*, removed it and now the water drains smoothly.
*I’m going bald, so this was sort of welcome news. 
Only in parts of the world where drain pipes are installed next to exterior walls. 
We keep ours nice and cozy inside the house. 
Just thought of another possibility. It’s less likely but easy to check.
If your fixtures are older, you probably have a trip-lever set-up that you activate when you want to fill the tub. This apparatus is a couple of rods with a weighted cylinder at the end.
Sometimes the system breaks and the cylinder falls, occluding the outlet drain. This has happened to me.
Unscrew the plate covering the switch that you flip up or down to open or close the tub drain. Then, manually pull up on the rod while running the water to see if it drains.
See the pink illustration on this page. The part that occludes is on the left, labeled “plunger”.
I was a drain cleaner for the first half of my Career and I’d seriously go with the plunger and WET rag in the overflow (Unscrew the overflow/stopper assembly and jam a wet rag down there. If the water drained out of the tub put more in and start plunging. You’d be surprised the amount of stuff that’ll come out.
Just know that some old tub drains are made of lead and can burst from the pressure. Also, depending on where you live and how old your house is you probably have what is called a drum trap, or Philadelphia trap behind the tub. It looks like a …drum. It unscrews from the top like a jar and the outlet drains out of the side, not the bottom. There is a hole in the bottom but it leads back up to your overflow.
Oh, and if you have a drum trap there’s no other way to snake it but from the trap itself.
Glad to know I’m not the only one who’s done that!
My wet-dry vac converts to a blower, and I’ve used it for more different kinds of jobs than I can remember. It’s the Swiss army knife of appliances. I even use it as a vac every once in a while.
On a practical note, I would caution novice people against disassembling the overflow assembly. There are ways it can go wrong, such as difficulty trying to screw it back on and disturbing the putty used to seal it to the tub. These issues aren’t difficult to deal with, but could be problematic if someone does not already have some kind of plumbing or home repair experience. But if you have that experience, plugging that drain pipe will make the plunging much more effective.
True. I just hate to see people get charged lots of money for something that probably doesn’t warrant it. But true. I agree.
Drain pipes usually do have water in them, i.e. the trap–it’s a feature, not a bug. While that wouldn’t be an issue with a sink, which usually has the trap indoors, a bathtub drain tends to run below the floor and somewhat “outdoors” as it were.
We often get freezing temperatures overnight this time of year, but almost never in the daytime. Do I need to worry about drainpipes freezing, or is that only an issue in places where the temperature stays below freezing more consistently?
We had the water pipes replumbed with PEX when we moved in, but that didn’t involve the drains.