Saturday, June 29, 2013

The Dang Drain is Clogged

I went to a neighborhood picnic tonight.  It was great, but when I got home to clean up, the sink backed up--almost up to the level with my clean dishes.  Really gross!

It was late, but who wants to deal with disgustingness in the morning?  Not me.  I knew my old standby of baking soda and vinegar followed by boiling water was not going to do the trick alone.  And there is NO WAY I'm going to use the commercial drain opener that can actually cause blindness if you get it in your eyes.

So, I remembered my landlord using a trick with a plunger in the sink.  (And I googled it to make sure I knew what I was doing.  See WikiHow.)  I have a double sink, so I checked which sink seemed to be the problem by poking a wooden skewer down each drain.  The one on the right was just fine, but the one on the left was clearly plugged up badly which called for drastic measures.

I put the drain plug into the right sink (wearing rubber gloves--really nasty water), then I used the plunger on the left sink.  The plug in the right sink still let water come up as the seal must not be very tight.  It took a couple tries, but I did get the left sink to drain properly.  I followed this with a dump of baking soda down the drain, followed by the vinegar to create a lovely volcano effect.  I left this for 5-10 minutes and followed up with a boiling water chaser.

My sink is just fine, thank you very much--without using something toxic and absolutely dangerous off the grocery store shelves.

NOTE; That is not an electrical cord in the photo, it's for my water filter which is NOT electric.  Just didn't want you to think I was playing with electricity in the water as my co-worker pointed out!



Water back-up in double sinks
Stick test to determine which sink is clogged
Using plunger in hot water in left sink
Adding baking soda


Adding vinegar after baking soda
Still foaming after several minutes









2 comments:

  1. Well, glad to hear that the baking soda + vinegar + hot water combination worked for you. And we might wanna add the plunger to that. However in some cases, these methods don’t work. Probably because the clog is too much to be taken on alone. When that happens to you, you can try using the snake to pull out whatever’s clogging your sink. Or, you can call for your trusted plumber. Anyway, good job!
    Lovella @ Perfection Plumbing & Drain Cleaning LTD.

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  2. Thanks for the comment Lovella. I've recently tried a "ZipIt" http://zipitclean.com/and it seems like it would work really well. But I'm sure a plumber might be needed in some extreme cases.

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