One of the most common problems every home owner or apartment dweller faces from time to time is a clogged drain, be it your sink, washing machine, bathtub, or dishwasher. How many times have you ever had a slow draining sink that took forever for the water to drain out? You've gone to the store and bought all kinds of liquid pipe cleaners or drain busters only to have to have them barely work or not work at all and instead of clearing your drain, its money down the drain. A plumber will charge you 100 bucks just to come out and hem and haw and tell you whats wrong, then charge 150 an hour labor to fix the problem.

I've found two things that work extremely well at getting rid of those clogged slow moving drains. The first thing I try is a wet and dry vac. available in most home repair and department stores. Remove the drain hose from your washing machine and apply vacuum to the end of the pipe. More often than not you'll feel that hose start to jump and jiggle as it clears out all that junk.

If that didnt work, get yourself a pipe snake. Pipe snakes are nothing but a coil of steel line with a small auger on the end and an offset sleeve to twist it with. They come in various sizes the most common are 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 and different lenghts from 25' to over 100'. For a 2" drain pipe I use a 50' 1/2" pipe snake. Take the service port off the main drain pipe going out of the house. This nothing but a 2 or 3" plug that screws into the pipe. Run your pipe snake using an in and out motion as far as it will go untill you hit the blockage. Slide your sleeve up to about 3' from where the pipe snake enters the pipe and tighten it with the twist screw. From there start turning the sleeve, you will find as you turn the sleeve, the auger grabs the blockage and begins pulling the snake on in. Let it pull itself in about a foot, then start doing the previous in and out motions, pulling it back about 2' then in again till it hits the blockage where you begin turning it again. Continue doing this till the pipe snake slides in and out freely as far as you can run it in there. Your drain will be open.

Pipe snakes also come in a motorized form where you mash a pedal and the twirling snake feeds itself into the hole and reverses to remove it. Good ones are very expensive and most home owners can't aford them. Most rent them from rental supply houses for around 40 bucks a day. You can buy a hand fed 1/2" 50' pipe snake at home depot for around 40-50 dollars.

Its messy and you'll be wanting to clean the pipe snake off after you use it and I list it as one of the more dirty jobs that I have to do around the house from time to time, but it beats calling a plumber and you get the satisfaction that you can do it yourself and will almost never have to call someone when your pipes back up.

Oct. 29, 2007

I ran into a major block today and try as I would, I could not get the drain open with my hand held 1/2" snake. I rented a motorized 1/2" 50 foot snake with a cutter head from the rental company for 34 dollars for 4 hrs. and it worked like a dream. I snaked three lines in less than an hour. problem solved.