Myths About Drain Cleaning
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You come home to find your drain is blocked. You start looking for a quick fix. However, when you apply, the situation worsens. This is quite common in most homes. It is high time you stop looking at the quick solutions available online and seek professional help to unblock drains.
Given below are certain drain cleaning myths with enough proof to show how useless they are. These myths include:
All drains are the same: Nothing can be farther from the truth. All drains and pipes are different, perform different functions, have different properties and hence require different tools to unblock and clear them. It is true that all drains, irrespective of their make, properties, work and position, lead to the same sewer. However, that in no way proves that they are the same. All professional plumbers come with a set of different tools from which they choose the appropriate one required. Thus attempting to fix drains without the required knowledge can prove to be a disaster, financially and otherwise.
Store-bought chemicals are excellent: Chemicals are, in fact, environmentally unsafe, bad for your health and worsen the clog. If the drain blockage is slight, chemicals can be used. However, plungers, drain snakes etc., are still preferred over chemicals. The problem with using chemicals for deep stubborn blockages is that it does not clear the blockage completely. It does manage to clear a small passageway so that water can pass but using chemicals makes blockages a recurring problem. It is best to call a professional plumber Sydney and let them resolve it.
Cleaning blocked sink is expensive: A simple and fixable issue is sometimes thought to be a serious and expensive problem. Since drain blocks cannot be viewed, it is difficult to understand the severity of the problem. This is probably the reason why people think unblocking sinks to be expensive.
Drain cleaning is easy: Knowing how to use the plunger and drain snake does not make you a drain-cleaning professional. These DIY methods help to clear small blockages. You might see the accumulated water in the sink start to ebb, but there is no way of knowing if you have successfully cleared the whole blockage. Any remaining debris would again start a clog making it necessary to unblock drains Additionally, the use of drain snakes can damage drains already corroded from regular use over time. Thus drain cleaning is neither easy nor a DIY project.
Toilets can flush out everything: This thought process is the cause of most blocked drains and pipe bursts. The septic system is only designed to carry out human wastes and toilet papers since they are degradable. Yet people flush out other things also like sanitary napkins, food, hair, cotton products, plastics etc. These tend to clog drains by being caught up in the bends of pipes.
A leaky tap is nothing serious: It is not the water leaking but the cause behind it that is serious. Some reasons for the same include problems with the tap washer, gaps between the pipe and the tap, blocked drains, etc. Water leakage is also a serious issue and hence all leaky taps should be immediately fixed by a professional plumber Sydney.
Such myths exist because of ignorance. This fact should be acknowledged and professional plumbers should be sought to deal with plumbing issues.
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Does the Vinegar-and-Baking-Soda Sink Cleaning Method Actually Work?
The vinegar-and-baking-soda sink cleaning method does have a real chemical reaction behind it, but it's not strong enough to fix an actual blockage. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, and vinegar is acetic acid. When they mix, you get a reaction that produces carbon dioxide gas, water and sodium acetate. That fizzing you see is the CO2 escaping, and the bubbling action does help loosen light grease film, soap scum and food residue sitting on the inside walls of the pipe.
The problem is what happens after the fizz stops, which is usually within a minute or two. That short burst of agitation has nowhere near the force to break up a solid clog, cut through built-up grease that's set hard, clear tree roots in an older sewer line, or shift a foreign object. If you've got a partial blockage and the water is draining slowly rather than sitting there, the vinegar and baking soda might buy you a day or two before the drain backs up again, because the reaction only ever touched the surface of the clog, not the mass of it.
The other downside we see on jobs is people pouring it down repeatedly over weeks, thinking the fizzing means it's working, while the actual blockage further down the pipe keeps building. By the time we get called out, it's often a fully blocked drain rather than a slow one, and that costs more time to sort.
A better natural option for light grease is a flush of hot water with a squeeze of dish soap, since the soap breaks the surface tension on fatty residue and the heat helps move it along, though we'd avoid boiling water on older PVC fittings. For anything that's actually stopped draining, skip the home remedies altogether. On an active blockage we go straight to jet blasting, which uses high-pressure water to physically cut through the clog, rather than a camera inspection, because a camera can't see through a live blockage anyway. Once the line is clear, that's when a CCTV inspection makes sense, to confirm what caused it and whether there's damage further down.
