Spring is here and that means spring cleaning season is upon us! While you’re emptying out your closets, dusting off the top shelves, deep-scrubbing your floors, and doing whatever other major cleaning plans you might have, it can be easy to overlook one of your home’s dirtiest and most unsanitary features: your drains. Drains are very much an out-of-sight, out-of-mind mess, but that mess can quickly turn into a frustrating cause of some major plumbing problems.
How Drain Cleaning Works
Professional drain cleaning services are done in a few different ways, depending on the size of your drain and what kind of debris might be in it. For example, your kitchen drain will more than likely have a significantly different type of debris in it than your bathroom drains will, and this means different problems will have different methods to deal with them.
In most cases, our plumbers like to recommend a jetting service. Jetting is the process of scrubbing the inside of your drain line using a high-pressure jet of water. It’s sort of like how you would use a pressure washer to scrub the stuck-in dirt and debris off of your patio or deck, only on a much smaller scale. The benefits to this process are numerous, but arguably the largest one is that jetting is all-natural and requires no added chemicals that are bad for the environment (and could damage your drain line).
During a jetting service, your plumber will feed a specialized jetting tool into your drain through the closest sewer cleanout. The tool not only blasts any obstructions in the line to bits, but also scrubs the debris stuck to your drain walls away, leaving your drain clean, smooth, and free from debris that could build up into a nasty blockage.
For larger lines, like your sewer line, your plumber may use a different method to remove certain types of debris. For large amounts of scale buildup, your plumber will use a tool that quickly spins a small amount of chain inside the line. This special chain head is rotated at a high speed, causing it to aggressively beat the debris off of the inside of your plumbing walls. Finally, your plumber may opt to use a rooter tool to remove any tree roots that may have found their way into your water or sewer lines. This issue is more common than you might think, particularly in older homes, so call for a sewer line inspection if it has been some time since you last had a plumber take a good look at your pipes.
Why Shouldn’t I Use a DIY Drain Cleaner?
DIY drain products may seem like an easy way to get rid of your drain problems, but the truth is they will usually only make things worse. Most drain cleaners are extremely strong chemicals designed to erode or eat away at anything that might be present in your drain line. By dissolving your blockage, water can easily leave your drain, preventing it from backing up any further.
However, drain cleaning chemicals eat away at everything they touch, and we mean everything. That includes the inside of your drain lines, your main sewer line, and even the main sewer system. Before long, these products can quite literally dissolve your drainpipe, allowing wastewater and sewage to seep out where you don’t want it to. These chemicals have also been known to cause damage to plumbing tools, which means they can also put your plumber in danger as well.
Save yourself the hassle and let our experienced plumbers handle your drain cleaning service this spring! Call Moe Plumbing at (818) 396-8002 and schedule your sewer inspection or professional drain cleaning service.