Taking good care of the drains that serve your Nampa, ID home can help you avoid a host of costly plumbing problems. Dirty, slow-moving drains can lead to stained sinks, shower pans, and tubs, frequent plumbing clogs, and eventual sewer line issues. However, taking drain cleaning into your own hands could prove just as expensive as negligence. Read on to discover common DIY drain cleaning mistakes and the disastrous effects they can have.
Excessive Plunging
Plungers are simple, inexpensive plumbing tools. Every home should have one. With a plunger, you can clear simple toilet clogs. If someone passes a larger-than-average stool or uses too much toilet paper, your plunger will come in handy. However, plungers aren’t drain-cleaning devices. If several thrusts don’t remove a blockage, applying too much force or plunging for too long might exacerbate the problem.
Plunging with excessive force can damage both drain lines and drain connections. If you aren’t sure about the type of obstruction you’re plunging, it can also force a solid, non-degradable item deeper into your plumbing system. In their efforts to clear stubborn drain blockages by themselves, some homeowners have broken their porcelain plumbing fixtures, cracked their pipes, and caused other serious damage.
What a Plunger Won’t Do
If you have dirty drains, there’s a good chance that the interior diameter of all connected wastewater pipes has decreased. Heavy linings of grease, soap scum, body oils, and hair can leave little room for liquid and solid waste to move through. Thus, even if a quick plunge works, it won’t eliminate the built-up debris that’s affecting drain functionality. You’ll still deal with sluggish, slow-moving drains, unpleasant drain odors, and recurring clogs.
DIY Plunging and Potential Health Issues
DIY plunging can be especially problematic when homeowners have a single plunger that they use for multiple clogs and fixtures, and when basic plunger maintenance is lacking. The same tool that you use to unclog your toilets could cause serious health issues if you use it in your shower pan, tub, or sink without proper sterilization.
DIY Drain Snaking
Drain snakes handle tough clogs that plungers cannot. Drain snakes are slim, retractable tools with sharp tips. As users extend these tools into drains, they bore through semi-solid materials to pierce and pull them out or break them apart.
Many things can go wrong when homeowners use drain snakes incorrectly. The sharp tips on these tools can scrape off protective pipe linings, damage the porcelain finishes on plumbing fixtures, or puncture weak and aging pipes. Much like DIY plunging, DIY drain snaking can also push stubborn clogs deeper into plumbing systems. When this happens, simple and low-cost repairs can turn into major plumbing projects.
DIY Drain Snaking and Fixture Warranties
Snaking your drains can cause many latent problems. Damaging porcelain coatings and protective pipe linings during DIY drain snaking accelerates corrosion and other age-related issues. This shortens the lifespans of covered plumbing components and could void their manufacturers’ warranties.
Drain Snaking Mistakes Can Cause Physical Harm
Among the many problems that DIY drain snaking can cause are a host of potentially serious physical injuries. Using these tools incorrectly can result in rapid recoiling that leads to puncture wounds, cuts, and eye damage. When open wounds come in contact with contaminated water from clogged fixtures or bacteria and biofilms from dirty pipes, people can additionally develop severe infections.
Chemical Drain Cleaners
One of the most common and frequently misused DIY drain cleaning techniques is applying caustic or corrosive chemical drain cleaners. Caustic drain cleaners are often loose powders or granules that homeowners pour into blocked drains or overflowing fixtures. As these products come into contact with water, they undergo a chemical reaction that generates heat. This heat “burns” through soft, organic materials to dissolve them.
Corrosive drain cleaners are the most popular type of store-bought drain cleaners available. These solutions are naturally corrosive and have the power to “eat” through stubborn buildups of hair, soap scum, and other general drain grime.
With both product types, there’s always the risk of having them fail to get the job done. When this happens, these products can remain trapped in fixtures and pipes indefinitely. Worse still, they remain caustic and corrosive while trapped.
Even if a chemical drain cleaner can’t clear your clog, it can “eat” through your pipes. In this way, these products can damage pipe linings and connections, drain lines, and drains. Incorrect use and repeated use can expedite the need for pipe replacement by causing major pipe leaks. The best way to protect the lifespan of your pipes and drains is by avoiding store-bought drain cleaners altogether.
The Potential for Physical Injury
As with DIY drain snaking, chemical drain cleaners pose a serious risk of physical injury. Both caustic and corrosive drain cleaners release strong fumes that can irritate the nasal passages, eyes, and airways, especially when used in poorly ventilated spaces like bathrooms.
When store-bought drain cleaners come in contact with the eyes or skin, they can cause contact burns and other potentially permanent damage. When these products fail to clear drains, they contaminate standing water. Even when diluted, chemical drain cleaners can still cause harm. Using these products before calling a plumber complicates the repair process and poses the risk of injury to plumbers as well.
Boiling Water
Pouring boiling water down your drains might melt accumulations of grease, body oils, and soap scum to expedite drain movement, but it can also melt your pipes. If you have PVC pipes or other PVC plumbing elements, this is a DIY drain cleaning technique to avoid.
Even if you don’t have PVC pipes, boiling water can still cause more problems than it solves. Hot water can loosen pipe connections by degrading sealants and adhesives. Moreover, all the melted grime that results from using this tactic will cool and harden as it enters your sewer pipe.
Why Professional, Preventative Drain Cleaning Is Best
Scheduling professional, preventative drain cleaning is always the best way to keep your drains moving swiftly and avoid problems like frequent drain blockages. Plumbers recommend scheduling these services at least once each year.
There are several options in professional drain cleaning, including hydro-jetting, mechanized drain snaking, and hydro-steaming. Each of these treatments sloughs off trapped waste and flushes it toward the sewer line. This leaves more room for effluence to move through, eliminates drain bacteria and drain odors, and reduces the risk of common, dirty drain problems like drain gnat infestations.
Discover Latent Problems
A major benefit of scheduling professional drain cleaning is the ability to identify and resolve latent plumbing issues before they occur. Foremost among these are whole-house backups. Whole-house backups occur when blockages in sewer lines send liquid and solid waste rushing back into homes. When cleaning your drains, our plumbers will look for multi-drain blockages, sewer gas odors, and other signs that you need sewer line cleaning or another urgent intervention.
We help homeowners in Nampa protect their drains with expert drain cleaning and drain repair services. Our draining cleaning treatments both correct and prevent common drain problems.
For top-notch draining cleaning in Nampa, get in touch with Prime Plumbing LLC now!
