Well, the chemicals are already in. Rubber gloves, clothes that are protective (& that you’ll throw away after), a bucket & a pipe wrench. Follow** Labrador Deceiver’s** instructions & you are set.
Also, we know that you are frustrated, but please don’t take it out on your pipes. Gentle Touch will do. Remember that they didn’t cause the clog: YOU did.
Or, if you are really lazy…
… you could remember that energy speeds up the reaction of many catalysts and that by making sure the standing water is boiling hot, you’ll make sure that the toxic waste soup of chemicals sitting in your sink are ‘all that they can be’.
You might want to wear heavy shoes though, because when the pipes burn through, your bare feet might dissolve. And no one wants to call you ‘Stumpy’. :eek:
I’m still reading and tapping my foot about this. I’ve been beset by relations all day and haven’t been able to work on it. I picked up a little yellow pipecleaner sort of thing that I haven’t had a moment to try out. No movement at all in the sink situation except that the fumes are getting to my head (or that be my mother.)
Tamarin, I looked at those Zip It cleaners but wasn’t sure if they would be sturdy enough. Maybe I’ll get one anyway just for kicks.
One of Drano’s products actually comes packaged with a little snake. I’ve taken that as an admission on their part that their product doesn’t really do much of anything, and frankly that’s consistent with my experience.
That’s a good thing. You do have to wait until all the Drano seeps through the clog.
Keep adding a couple of cups of very hot water whenever it drain down (not from the tap - that won’t be hot enough.) You can also poke at it - gently - with a unwound wire coat-hanger. You should use a plunger first the next time it clogs.
You might want to try flushing some baking soda down it with distilled white vinegar every week, or month, to keep it clean. The bubbling seems to break up the soapy build up.
Yes, there are (Liquid Fire is the one you can sometimes find). However, the OP didn’t use one, nor has anyone suggested it so far. I didn’t want the OP to think he has dumped acid down his drain.
I had a plumber get his snake caught in my pipe. He must have spent ten minutes yanking on it. It finally came out with the cap from a tube of toothpaste. Something left behind by a previous homeowner.
a drop of that chemical in your eye would be serious damage.
you need to assume any liquid you now come in contact with with have some of the corrosive chemical in it. you and anyone nearby should have full eye goggles on (the kind you wore [or should have] in chemistry lab in school). gloves are good.
if you get some on you then a dunk in the toilet would help. tub or shower could also be used.
you can run a snake carefully and slowly into it. you want to absolutely not splash it around. the snake as it is withdrawn will have the chemical on it. you will want to rinse the snake after use using the same safety precautions.
Be careful doing this if you already have drain cleaner in, but using a shop vac has always worked quite well for me, for both the sink and the shower drains.
Just plug up the overflow with a plastic bag, put the hose in the drain, (you may need to put a bag around the nozzle if it is smaller than your drain, but you can also get cone shaped nozzles that will fit any size) and switch on. You should probably also make sure the shop vac is made for water use, but most are I believe.
Be a bit careful with this, as you will be drawing sewer gases into the vacuum once the drain has cleared, so you probably want to have ventilation going, not really that dangerous, as long as you don’t keep the vacuum on for a long time, but it stinks quite nicely.
If you don’t have one, I recommend getting one for all sorts of utility purposes including drain cleaning.
Well, it’s turned into a job for the Pros - and the Pros are not optimistic.
I tried the little home-user snake that I bought. The problem was that it was too short. Even reaching a couple feet down, I could tell that the obstruction was way downstream. So rather than just buy longer snakes, I called in a plumber. He put his snake down as far as he could - and he still couldn’t reach the obstruction.
The main problem is that this house is an antique. The pipes snake around in all direction. There could well be a toothpaste cap down there, but he can’t reach it. So he put in some industrial version of draino and said he’d check back tomorrow. If there’s still no movement, (and there isn’t, that I can see), that means we need to open up the ceiling in the dining room and try to trace the pipes from there. I guess if that fails, there’s always arson.
Thanks for the advice, everyone. I do appreciate it. And you know, I do have a shop vac … I haven’t tried that yet but I’ll mention to the plumber.
Once upon a time, we had a toilet that wouldn’t flush properly. We ran a snake down it with no effect. Mind you, it wasn’t totally clogged, just slow.
Ultimately a plumber had to pull the toilet. We found a metal canning-jar lid - the flat circular part that covers the top of the jar inside a detachable ring - sitting just inside the floor drain. It acted just like a flap valve - the snake just tipped it out of the way, after which it would settle right back into place.
The plumber said it was the single most unusual case he had ever seen.
I had the same thought. I think it’s because drain cleaner always makes me think about that poor guy who tried to kill himself with drain cleaner and survived without an esophagus.
going back to my acid story… previous to this I use to routinely take the sink apart and run a snake down it quite a distance. It had to be at the junction where all the upstairs waste entered into the down pipe. The whole design layout was poor from the start. Ended up replacing every bit of iron pipe with PVC and in the process was able to install gracefully curving bends instead of the right angle stuff originally installed. If you have an old house it’s likely you’re fighting this and it makes it very hard to get a snake past all the junctions because of the hard turns.
If by some horrible misfortune you find yourself replacing pipes then make sure they use long sweep fittings instead of standard fittings. When I switched over all my problems went away. Along sweep fitting versus standard fitting. It meant putting in an access panel in a closet but it was soooooooo worth not having to snake the line out multiple times a year.
Don’t let them talk you into a texture ceiling. Use wallboard screws every four inches and accept that you will need to re-mud the seams in about four years; it’s still less work that a textured ceiling.
