Sunday, September 5, 2010

Slow going, huh?

Ol Doc and I were discussing plumbing woes and I mentioned that I had started pouring boiling water down the tub drains in both bathrooms. Why? To keep 'em flowing and to discourage any little tree rootlets which might have invaded the drains. I have to admit that the drains flow better since I started doing this - and they are 51 year old drains in the oldest part of the house. She said I might want to post it on my blog. So I have.

We were also discussing clearing blockages in commodes and I told her that buckets of water poured into the bowls work better if they are hot water from the tap instead of cold tap water. I saw this tip in Good Housekeeping magazine. True, too.

Of course, if the blockage is made of toys or something similar, fuh-ged aboudit.

3 comments:

ol Doc said...

I thank you for the tips. We once opened the outside trap to see why the terlits were running sooo slowly and found a hand towel sloshing back and forth. Too big to go all the way down, too much fabric to retrieve with a plunger.

So if you ever count the towels and come up one short, there's another place to check....

RANGER said...

J and I have decided that the hand towel is another kind of toy. Heh.

Wonderful that you have an outside trap you can open. Our outside trap required excavation beneath the front walk last time we needed to open it.

I am happy that you had a relatively easy solution to the prob. Relatively in the sense that the whole house didn't flood - that kind of relative.

Zeta said...

My washer machine seeks another place to empty its cycle of water when draining. My kitchen sink is plan-B for this appliance. The solution to this problem very time consuming. A very long, long, and even longer snake has to be driven from the roof and end up under our house to the point where the drain is free to flow. The plumber who fixed the drain several years ago told me, “It will happen again since all of these homes in this area have the same issue.” So for several years we were able to forget this ever happen until…….a few weeks ago.