I can now add successfuly dismantling and reassembling a sink trap to my list of life accomplishments. Whee. I actully feel pretty good that I am smarter than my sink plumbing. I just wish I’d been able to solve the slow drain problem. I suspect I’m going to have to round up a plumber’s snake and do it again. 🙁
EDIT (5/25/05): We rented a plumber’s snake. It wasn’t long enough. We weighed the options and decided that the best use of resources (Time and money) was for me to call a plumber while Howard got back to comics. The plumber used a 50 foot electric powered snake and made the clog be gone.
I know you guys are on a budget too, but everytime our shower drain gets slow (my fiancee has really long hair), I use that Draino Gel or Liquid Plumber Gel, whichever is cheaper at the time. That stuff is amazing. 🙂
Haley’s Cleaning Hints suggests “Pour about 5 or 6 tbsp. baking soda down the drain. Immediately add a cup of vinegar and, once the fizzing and bubbling stops, follow with a kettle of boiling water.” I also have a card I received in the mail with cleaning hints – it suggests dropping 3 Alka Seltzer tablets down the drain followed by a cup of white vinegar, wait a few minutes, then run the hot water. If one of these doesn’t work we have a bottle of Drano Max we could let you use.
Since I started growing my hair out our bathtub drain has developed a slow drain. I need to go buy a hair trap to prevent it from getting any worse.
Good luck.
My dad’s solution involves a long piece of wire with a hook on the end and lots of digging. Then again, the problem involved very old, dodgy plumbing running through areas we did not want to spill caustic substances in, so we couldn’t try to dissolve anything.
Interesting. I guess I should give it a go then too. I have one drain in the house that is completely clogged up to the point where water takes about an hour to drain out of the sink. Draino and similar chemicals proved useless on it. I’ve been putting it off because we have another perfectly good sink in the house. I suspect my wife accidentally dropped masses of pine shavings down the sink.
I just dismantled the bottom end of my sink as well and sped the drain up considerably by cleaning out the gunk. The gunk seemed to be about 90% pine shavings from my wife’s adventures in taking care of small rodents. I suspect I’ll also need to rent a pipe snake to clean out the upper end of the pipe it seems.
Sounds like the snake is probably your best bet. The plumber I talked to said that for certain kinds of clogs draino does nothing. Apparently pine shavings is one of those clogs.