Preventing Expensive Drain Clogs With Drain Cleaning Service | New Orleans, LA
Every time you run water in your house, that water has to go down a drain. If a drain is clogged or damaged, you might notice water pooling up in sinks, bathtubs, and other fixtures. You could be dealing with a huge mess if that water overflows, but a clogged drain is an inconvenience either way. If you want to avoid paying for emergency drain cleaning services and keep your drains operational, here are some tips for preventing drain clogs in your New Orleans, LA home.
How Do Drains Work?
For every fixture in your home — toilets, sinks, bathtubs — you need to run water lines in addition to drain lines. The drain lines that come from your fixture run underneath your home (under a slab or in a crawlspace) and each individual drain line connects to the main line. Most drain cleaning services focus on removing clogs in individual drain lines because that’s usually where grease, small objects, and other causes of clogs get lodged.
While most clogs occur in smaller drain lines, main drain lines can also get clogged. These main line clogs often happen as a result of several years of abuse, whether you’re rinsing the wrong stuff down your kitchen sink or flushing so-called flushable wipes down the toilet. If you need to hire a drain cleaning expert to remove a main line clog, the process typically takes longer and costs more.
Avoiding Drain Abuse
As a homeowner, the best thing you can do to protect your New Orleans, LA home is to avoid abusing your drains. Putting the wrong things down your kitchen sink or toilet drain can lead to major clogs. If you don’t take care of those clogs, you could end up spending a fortune to hire a drain cleaning service to remove a main line clog. Here are some tips for preventing that.
Kitchen Drains
Kitchen drains are one of the biggest culprits when it comes to drain clogs because these are the drains people put food in. You might not run into any major issues when you’re rinsing broth or cereal milk down the drain, but certain foods can lead to serious drain clogs if you repeatedly put them in your kitchen sink.
Grease is the biggest culprit when it comes to drain clogs. While grease is a liquid when it’s hot, it turns back into a solid when it gets cold. This means that any grease you rinse down your kitchen sink will probably stick to the inside of the drain line and become a solid. As more grease builds up and becomes a solid, it can clog up the entire pipe. If you don’t want to pay for drain cleaning services, dump grease into a glass or metal container and throw it in the garbage. You can also wipe excess grease off of pans before you rinse them in the sink.
Some of the other foods you should watch out for include coffee grounds, eggshells, bones, and fibrous vegetables. These foods don’t break down in water as well as other foods, and eggshells and coffee grounds have a tendency to stick to the walls of drain lines. The good news is that you can use all this food waste in your compost bin.
Bathroom Drains
As far as the bathroom goes, no drain is safe.
Toilets are a major concern for several reasons. You should only flush toilet paper down your toilet, but several brands make so-called flushable wipes. Long-term use of these wipes will lead to expensive drain cleaning service calls 100% of the time because they simply don’t break down in the toilet. The same is true of paper towels, cigarette butts, tampons, and condoms.
Bathroom sinks often get clogged as a result of shaving. Hair and soap scum combine to form a plug that accumulates every time you shave, so you should try to avoid rinsing your beard hair down the sink. Instead, you can put a plastic bag in the sink to catch hair or use an electric razor that’s designed to trap hair as you shave.
Shower drains are mostly the same as bathroom sinks, only the accumulation of hair is harder to avoid. A drain catch can help you avoid drain cleaning service calls, but remember to empty it out when it starts to get full or it might not work properly.
Are Liquid Drain Cleaners Effective?
Every year, homeowners spend a fortune on liquid drain cleaners in an effort to prevent expensive drain cleaning calls. So, do these liquid drain cleaners really work?
Truthfully, most of the popular drain cleaners don’t do a whole lot. If you’re using a product like Drano that breaks up clogs through a chemical reaction, you could actually cause damage to your drain lines. Most drain cleaning service companies recommend against using chemical-based liquid drain cleaners.
There are enzyme-based liquid drain cleaners that are safe and somewhat effective, but there’s no replacement for a good drain cleaning. As long as you hire a drain cleaning service every few years and treat your drains right, they should stay relatively clog-free.
Maintaining Your Drain
If you want to prevent clogs in your New Orleans, LA home, the best thing you can do is avoid putting grease and other harmful stuff down drains. You can also use an enzyme-based drain cleaner occasionally to help break up small clogs before they progress.
Do you need a professional drain cleaning service to get your drains up and running again? bluefrog Home Services of New Orleans has your back. If your drains are clogged or running slow, give us a call at 504-229-4848 and we’ll get everything cleaned out for you.
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