LESLIE: John in West Virginia needs some help with a shower drain. Tell us what’s going on.
JOHN: Hi, good day. I’ve tried several products – you know, several over-the-counter products – to clean out the drain. It’s very sluggish. I’ve tried the – oh, it’s like a sulfuric acid-type product on several occasions and it’s worked – works temporarily then its like after a few weeks later it starts to clog back up again and it drains very slowly. Like to know if you know any products that would work where I wouldn’t have to clean the drain out so frequently.
LESLIE: Hmm, it seems like you guys just have a collective system of, unfortunately, say, like hair and soap products that tend to clog up the drain. What you need to do is get that drain free-flowing. Sometimes it requires a snaking of the drain. Tom has a little trick where he likes to use a wet/dry vac to see if he can get whatever is near the surface of the drain; you know, a super-duper wet/dry vac to just get some of that debris up and maybe release some of that clog.
TOM: Yeah, it sucks but it works. (Tom chuckles)
JOHN: It sucks. OK. (chuckles)
TOM: Yeah. Use the wet/dry vacuum. You can pull a lot of the debris that’s in that trap right back up …
LESLIE: Right to where you can grab it.
TOM: Mm-hmm.
LESLIE: The other thing you need to do, John, is once you get that drain running fairly clearly you need to sort of, monthly, pour down there one of those living, active cultures. You mix it up with a little bit of water. You pour it down there and it eats all of that soap scum and debris that’s in there that tends to gunk up and clog it. It requires some maintenance. Because you don’t want to keep clogging it and you really don’t want to use those heavy-duty cleansers because that can deteriorate the plumbing.
JOHN: OK, well thank you very much.
TOM: You’re welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
Leave a Reply