What Professional Drain Cleaning Entails | New Orleans, LA

8/21/2020

Photo By Maciej Oleksy at Shutterstock

When you have a clogged drain and just give up on it because nothing you do seems to work do you wonder what the professionals do that you can’t? Have you ever wondered what kind of tools or items these professionals use to clean your drains? In the low lying area of New Orleans, LA you may see different things come out of a drain cleaning professionals truck that really seem foreign to a regular homeowner. We’ll go over that along with some items that may be stuck in your pipes causing the clogs to begin with.

The Tools

There are four major tools used by drain cleaning professionals that are your normal home-duty personal tools. These include drain snakes, augers, hydro-jetters, and video scopes. You may have your own drain snake that is a couple feet long but that is just scraping the surface of the pipe system. Your drains can go way past that, if you have a large house and are far back from a drain hookup or septic tank you’re looking at dozens of feet where these drain snakes are sent down so your home item won’t be good enough.

Another step in drain cleaning from drain snakes for drain cleaners are drain augers. These machines are generally automated and will keep rolling through your pipes until they run into a clog or something that is blocking advancement of sewage like a tree root or it will see if there is a break in the drain line. These units can be large, they can be loud but they are very effective. They’ll make the long snakes look mild by comparison. You can escalate this again with a machine called a hydro-jetter. Essentially they take one of those automatic augers until it hits a clog. It will send an extremely high pressure level of water that can rip apart clogs in the way that a regular auger tip can not.

If the actual tools can’t fix the problem or a drain cleaning gets stopped you might see the usage of video inspection equipment. This will make any future job easier on the agent sent from a plumbing service to do drain cleaning as it will give them insight to figure out what is actually stopping the flow of sewage in your pipes. These microscopic cameras have come a long way in the past twenty years and can send back fairly high resolution images with little to no trouble which is amazing.

What Is Stuck?

As previously mentioned in the paragraph about drain augers your professional drain cleaner may run into tree roots. If you live somewhere that has a tree in your front yard or your water connection is underneath the canopy of a tree you have the opportunity for a tree root to creep into the pipe. This is a common occurrence in New Orleans, LA and actually across the country. Tree roots will actively seek out damper soil which will happen to be near the water and sewage pipes and can eventually break the pipes to get inside. Once inside your pipes the tree root will swell to absorb more water. Nature really does have a way of fixing itself after being disturbed by us.

Inside your home is likely your own doing. From your kitchen the drain cleaning service may see things like bone fragments that you need to be careful about mixed with plastics and food residue lodged with grease, one of the biggest factors to slow and clogged drains. Pouring grease down your drains is never a good idea because as it gets cooler it slows down, eventually stopping and sticking to whatever it is in contact with. Over time it will layer up and constrict the entirety of the drain rendering it useless. A bottle of drain cleaner won’t stop once it gets to that point, and a professional drain cleaning service will be on your to do list sooner rather than later. Other items that can have the same effect are coffee grounds and starchy foods like rice breads or pastas as each of those swell as they absorb water and after they hit a certain density will not move with the flow of water.

In the bathroom you may not be surprised that drain cleaners deal with a lot of hair clogs, especially in your sinks, tubs, and showers. They also see major build ups from soaps and cleaners as these generally have some sort of agent that creates a film that can bind onto other particles in your drains. These are the kind of clogs that if caught early enough can be fixed by a homeowner but you never know how deep or how complex a problem is, especially when the substances a lot of people pour down their drains to clean them can end up being worse for the pipes than the crud stuck inside. Toilet drains however tend to have issues when the pipes are too old to handle the flow of a growing family with age or when foreign objects are flushed. We’ve all seen commercials about a toddler flushing jewellery and seeing how many golf balls can flow through their bends before clogging up but that doesn’t mean the drain pipes behind the hardware can or should take that abuse.

When you find your home in need of drain cleaning service in the area give the experts at bluefrog Plumbing + Drain in Belle Chasse.Their licensed and professional plumbers are available all day every day for every plumbing need. Visit their website at bluefrogplumbingneworleans.com or call 504-457-7204. They can crack the toughest clogs with their professional equipment and are based in the New Orleans area meaning they know all of the intricacies of the low lying area we live in. So the next time your pipes stop working contact bluefrog Plumbing + Drain of New Orleans to take care of your major drain cleaning problems.