Toronto Plumbers Blog: clogged Drain Pipes

Drain clogs, while a conventional Toronto home plumbing problem, so how can you deal with these problems quickly, and put them behind you in an affordable manner?

Fortunately, there are a number of at-home remedies you can try, which often help homeowners completely resolve their drain clogging issues. By knowing what techniques, preventative measures and tools you can use right now to eliminate frustrating clogs, you can greatly limit how a clog may affect your home plumbing in the future.

Simple Hot Water Application

One of the most simple and conventional ways to handle a home drain clog is through an easy hot water flush. The heat, along with growing water pressure and force, will often burst through clogged drain pipes, freeing whatever had become lodged within the pipe. This solution should be your first unclogging attempt, as it requires nothing other than a working faucet and heated water (something you should already have available).

Run hot water through your drain pipes for 10-15 minutes, and reassess the clogging. If this first step proves unsuccessful, don’t worry too much; there is a number of other, at-home methods of drain unclogging you can try before the need to contact a professional arises.

Homemade Chemical Solutions

One of these additional methods is a homemade chemical mixture (NOT those hazardous, chemical solutions you can buy at your local home improvement stores; those can, in fact, damage your pipes, while also posing great personal health risks).

At Mister Plumber in Toronto, we offer a less dangerous, and far more convenient solution: a tried and true baking soda and vinegar mixture can do wonders in relieving a clog from your home drain pipes. When these mixed elements react, they will often dissolve through clogged gunk or other materials. This often performs the same duties as chemical cleaners, but without the health risks and pipe damaging agents that come with commercial cleaners.

DIY Drain Snaking

One incredibly valuable tool many homeowners don’t know they can find for home use are the drain snakes, our augers, which professional plumbing specialists use to dismantle and free clogs. These tools, often found at home improvement stores, can knock away clogged substances in a matter of seconds, and pull out any stubborn gunk concentrations that may be affecting your drains.

Effective at either breaking away clogged materials, or pulling larger lumps out through a drain entry point, these handy tools are often the perfect solution to moderate clogging, and are relatively simple to use.

Using Your Standard Plunger

One solution you may not have even considered for unclogging home drain pipes and general drain cleaning is your standard, home plunger. All you have to do is fill your sink or tub with about three inches of water, form a tight seal around the drain entrance with your plunger, and push back and forth rhythmically.

Continue this for about a half-minute to one minute, and at a steady pace; this builds air pressure in your drain pipes with every individual push, which can effectively dismantle most clogged materials. Additionally, specialized sink plungers are made specifically for these applications, which can be found at your local home improvement store for an affordable price, making them a tool easily worth the investment.

Cover Up Overflow Vents

However, while plunging alone can be an effective clog remedy, there is one critical step many homeowners forget when trying this method: cover your overflow vents! These are the air slits and holes along the brim of your sink, which keep overflows from occurring. As they are direct opening to your drain pipes, leaving these open while plunging a clog away with only result in the physical force from plunging escaping.

Using a plunger to eradicate a drain clog is only effective if these openings are tightly sealed; try using a wet close, a flat, hard surface (if the vent surface itself is flat), or even duct tape to seal these vents.

Out Of Ideas? Try Soda!

Much like the homemade solutions we’ve talked about earlier in this blog, another perfect clog-clearing solution may be sitting right under your nose, in your home refrigerator. Carbonated soda products can actually be used to dissolve clogged materials, with astounding success.

The dissolving agents, such as phosphoric acid, within sugary soda products eat away at grease and clogs, eliminating any clogging in a much safer manner than with commercial cleaners. Once completed, simply flush your drains out with water to clear the loose materials out of your drain.

Check Your Plumbing Traps

Often, the everyday clogs homeowners are faced with can be completely removed by removing and cleaning your drain fixture’s plumbing trap. These traps are the curvatures a short way along drain pipes, which use gravity to form a natural water seal between your home’s air and harmful sewer pipe gasses.

While these pipe sections perform a crucial role in keeping your drains running efficiently, and keeping your family safe from sewer gasses, clogs can, and do, develop at the bottoms of these curves, as they are low-points in a drain system. Fortunately, plumbing traps can usually be removed and cleaned out with little effort (a process we go into further here), restoring your drains to their normal state.

Get A Toronto Professional’s Help

When all else fails, do not hesitate to call a professional! If you notice warning signs of a clog, or develop grime accumulation, contact your local plumbing service professional right away for an expert evaluation. Acting now can help you avoid more severe drain clogging and damages, as well as more expensive repairs, in the future.

Drain cleaning professionals have the right experience and tools to take on virtually any drain pipe clogging, no matter the circumstance. Best of all, these services are affordable under any budget, and well worth restoring your drains!

Avoid Clogs Altogether

Of course, one of the easiest ways to fix a drain clog problem is to avoid developing one altogether; this can be done with the right prior consideration and care for your plumbing, saving you in the long-run. Most of all, be wary of what you throw down your garbage disposal; despite its name, it is not a garbage can.

Avoid running the following through your garbage disposal:

Fibrous food products, such as food skins and stringy vegetables
Animal bones and cartilage waste
Plastic wrappers or household paper products
Food wrappers, or anything non-biodegradable
Expandable food products
Kitchen grease and oil

Check Your Drains Regularly

The best way to prevent clogs from developing in your home’s plumbing is to check your drains semi-regularly, and take precautionary note of any performance problems. Notice strange odors coming from your drains, or water backup when running your sink? Try the above methods, or contact a plumbing service professional right away.

If you are still looking for trusted plumber, Mister Plumber in Toronto, Etobicoke, Scarborough, North York specializing sewer repair, upgrade waterline, water service upgrade, drain cleaning, backwater valve installation, lead pipe replacement, re-piping and emergency plumbing, Mister Plumber uses the latest technology to effectively troubleshoot and quickly repair any plumbing problem and offers a fast response and free estimates.

More Info: www.misterplumber.ca

Reliable and Trustworthy Plumbing services.

Call a fully-licensed, bonded and insured Toronto plumber at 416 939 1530

Cleaning your Toronto home’s drain pipes with professional-level effectiveness does not have to be hard on your time or your budget. In fact, drain cleaning can actually be quite simple, if you know the proper tools and techniques you can use for at-home jobs! In this article, we’ve provided an outline for five of the most useful drain cleaning tips and tricks you can use today to improve your drain’s performance.

Hot Water and Home-made Solutions

Probably the most straightforward and harmless drain cleaning solution is hot water. Just running your faucet on its highest setting through your drain pipe can often dislodge minor clogs, and clear away grime; for drain pipes, temperature can work just as well as chemical cleaners at removing gunk and debris build up! If your sink’s water flow is not high enough, or it’s water temperature too low, try running boiling water through your drain instead.

Hot water applications are also effective cleaners for bathtub drains, where the tub faucet is directly above the drain. Just like sink faucet water cleaning, hot water run through your tub faucet can potentially clear out any grime and clogging materials within the drain pipe.

This solution is less effective for shower drains, as they receive hot water flow on a regular basis. In these cases, you may want to try a home-made, safe chemical solution.

A mixed baking soda and vinegar solution can also clear out stubborn gunk in your home’s drains, especially in shower drains that receive hot water regularly. A very effective home remedy, these solutions react to one another within your drain pipes, and can dissolve most minor clogging elements. They are also much safer than commercial chemical cleaners, which can corrode pipes and cause skin and eye damage upon accidental contact.

You Can Snake Your Own Drain Like the Pros

Another drain cleaning alternative, growing in popularity today, is drain snaking. Once considered only a professional practice, drain snakes, or augers, can be commonly purchased at home improvement stores, and are relatively simple to operate.

These snakes are fed through drains, and grab at clogs and blockages upon contact; then, they will either break away the blockage and force it safely through your plumbing, or can be pulled out with the clog material intact.

Mister Plumber go over the drain snaking process in detail, but here is a quick recap of how to remove clogs with a drain snake:

Feed the drain snake into your clogged drains and turn the snake’s handle clockwise
Keep feeding the snake into the drain pipe until you feel resistance
Rotate the snake against the blockage, and capture clog materials
Pull the snake from the drain slowly, as not to lose the clogged gunk
Reassemble your drain cover and test drain performance

Now, you can remove clogs and grime build-up with professional efficiency!

Your Home Plunger Can Do the Trick

As you may or may not be aware, the standard toilet plunger in your home right now can be used to resolve drain clogs! Simply fill your sink to a halfway point with water, and form a tight seal around the drain entrance with your plunger.

Simply push back and forth fluidly for about half a minute, forcing pressurized water into your drain and building up pressure with every push. It can also help to smear petroleum jelly around the rim of the plunger, as this improves the plunger’s suction to your sink, and creates a much tighter seal. You can also buy a specialized sink plunger at your local home improvement store, a model more efficient at removing sink clogs.

Video Inspection Can Detect Major Clogs and Build up

For more severe clogs, you can contact your local Toronto plumbing professionals and receive a professional video inspection of your drain pipes. These inspections are completed using wire snakes much like standard plumbing snakes, but in this case fixed with a small camera.

These video inspection snakes are fed through your damaged, clogged or dirty pipes, and can use video relay to detect virtually any damage, such as:

Root infiltration
Drain pipe cracking
Blockages and loose debris
Chemical corrosion within a pipe
Collapsing inner pipes

Professional-grade video inspections of your home drains can determine whether your pipe’s poor performance is due to severe damages, or if your pipe is merely obstructed, such as by hair, oil or grease.

Toronto plumbing specialists can also use video inspection snakes to check how successful a cleaning was, and give home-owners peace of mind that their drain pipes are effectively cleaned. This innovative technology, similar in concept to the tube cameras used by surgeons and medical professionals, gives customers more accuracy and detail that they could ever expect from a plumbing service.

Keep Your Drain Clean With Routine Inspection

Something many home-owners forget is the importance of regular drain pipe inspection. These inspections don’t even have to be completed by a professional; you can self-diagnose your drain pipe performance at home, and should do so once a month. A regular self-inspection and cleaning schedule can largely prevent grime, debris, gunk and other objects from gathering in your drain pipes.

That said, you should not completely abandon professional drain pipe inspections. Most Toronto plumbing professionals suggest having a specialist inspection once a year, if not more. This is because these specialists know the signs; they know what to look for in problem areas, where to look for it, how problems develop and the ideal remedial steps you should take in you specific circumstances.

When the times comes to call a professional Toronto plumbing service, there are three key traits to look for:

Unmatched service quality
Efficiency and prompt service
A fair, affordable price

Sometimes, home remedies won’t be enough to effectively clean your drains. If you feel in over your head, know when to call a Toronto plumber. If you’re experience frequent drain clogs or other performance abnormalities, or would like to set up a professional inspection of your home drain pipes today, contact Mister Plumber right now!

If you are still looking for trusted plumber, Mister Plumber in Toronto, Etobicoke, Scarborough, North York specializing sewer repair, upgrade waterline, water service upgrade, drain cleaning, backwater valve installation, lead pipe replacement, re-piping and emergency plumbing, Mister Plumber uses the latest technology to effectively troubleshoot and quickly repair any plumbing problem and offers a fast response and free estimates.