Reasons You Should Schedule Regular Drain Cleaning | Carrollton, TX
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Your Carrollton, TX, home is a source of pride and joy, and a place that you as homeowner care for regularly. However, one thing that many homeowners don’t think about often is their drains – until it becomes an emergency. Drain cleaning is essential to keeping your North Texas home running smoothly and it also prevents costly clogs and emergencies. For preventative maintenance and emergency services, bluefrog Plumbing + Drain of North Dallas, is the first choice for savvy homeowners.
Regular Drain Cleaning?
Over time, drains become backed up from hair, food scraps, soap chunks, and other matter. Little clogs can “catch” other pieces of debris and grow into larger ones, eventually completely blocking the pipe. If the blockage persists, it reduces the water flow through your pipes and can put excess pressure on the seams or weak spots in the pipes.
This, in turn, can cause a pipe to burst. This is a costly emergency and, while bluefrog can easily fix these, it’s expensive and messy for our clients, which is why we encourage regular drain cleaning.
Drain cleaning is important. In the kitchen, food clogs can start to smell and attract fruit flies. In the bathroom, clogs in the sink and tub can make bathing and showering unpleasant, or make shaving in the sink unsanitary. Clogs in your toilet pipes can cause messy overflows and eventually ruin your commode.
Preventing Clogs in Drains
You can enjoy properly flowing plumbing with a little attention to what’s going into your drains – and what shouldn’t. Here are some tips for taking care of every room in the house.
The Water Closet
The “WC” aka the toilet isn’t designed to take everything that goes into it. Just because something can be flushed down doesn’t mean it should. Many plumbing experts recommend that the only things that go into the toilet are waste and toilet tissue. Things like baby wipes, “flushable” cloths, tissues, and paper towels, while similar to toilet paper, actually aren’t made to break down in the sewer like t.p. does.
Sewers have certain enzymes in the pipes that help break down human waste and dissolve toilet paper – in fact, toilet paper is designed to disintegrate into the wastewater for easy treatment. Tissues, wipes, and paper towels, however, are created to hold their integrity even when wet, which is why they don’t break down in the sewer and can lead to huge clogs in the city pipes. In your own home, these paper products can get stuck around corners or U-bends and create a back-up.
Other things that shouldn’t be flushed are feminine hygiene products and condoms. Carefully wrap and throw these into the trash. If you like, keep a small box of Ziploc bags in the bathroom to more securely dispose of these items.
In the Kitchen
Even if you have a garbage disposal, you should still be mindful of what goes into it. The “teeth” of the garbage disposal are small and made to chop a few stray pieces of food, not entire chunks. Make sure vegetable peels, fruit cores and peels, eggshells, and coffee grounds all go into the trash can.
Another common source of clogs is cooking oil and grease from meat. While you might think this is ok to put in the kitchen drain because it’s liquid, in truth it’s actually damaging for your pipes. When cooking grease cools, it solidifies, creating a partial blockage in your drain. The solidified grease can trap other solid items, gradually becoming larger until it completely blocks the pipes.
In the Shower
If you don’t have drain screens in place, purchase these for your shower and tub. Drain screens will trap most of the hair rinsed off in the tub and shower, preventing it from getting into your pipes. To clean, simply remove the screen and cut the hair off, then replace it.
While drain screens are effective, they aren’t foolproof, so make sure to schedule regular drain cleaning in your bathroom, too.
In the Laundry Room
Your washing machine can benefit from a drain screen, as well. When you’re washing laundry, sometimes debris or little pieces of food or lint can end up in the washing water, building up in the pipes, too. You can purchase a screen that fits over the water drain from your washing machine, trapping the solid matter. Simply remove and clean on a regular basis.
Should I Hire Professionals For Drain Cleaning?
The short answer? Yes! Professional drain cleaning services can safely remove even the largest clogs and diagnose any plumbing problems that may be contributing to excessive clogs.
You may think that a plunger or liquid drain cleaning solution you buy at the hardware store are enough, but any good plumber will tell you this isn’t the case. Plungers can temporarily remove a block of waste matter or dislodge stuck toilet tissue, but plunging a toilet or piles doesn’t actually extract the matter causing the clog.
Chemical solutions are harsh, and while they can dissolve some of the solid elements of clogs, they can’t completely remove larger ones. Plus, the chemical solutions are harsh on pipes and can, with regular use, corrode the material. This, in turn, creates weak spits in the pipes making them more likely to leak or burst.
Professional drain cleaning services, so the other hand, are conducted carefully. First, a small camera on a cord is inserted into the pies, surveying the blockages and determining the composition of them. The drain cleaning service tech will then extract the clogs, testing the pipes to ensure that they’re completely clear. With regular drain cleaning service, small clogs can be removed before they become larger, damaging ones.
Let’s Get Cleaned Out!
bluefrog Plumbing + Drain of North Dallas offers preventative maintenance and drain cleaning packages to remove small clogs before they turn into big emergencies. Depending on your home’s plumbing usage, we can do these every 6 months or annually. We also offer emergency clog removal in Carrollton, TX. Give us a call or visit us online for an individual consultation and a quote today!
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