These 5 drain cleaning tips will help you maintain a happy and healthy drain system within your home or business.

1. When to Schedule a Drain Cleaning?

Pouring a bottle of acidic chemicals down a clogged drain is not “Drain cleaning”. This is just a type of “drain unclogging”—and many times it won’t achieve that. Worse, those chemicals can end up doing damage to your drainpipe!

Actual drain cleaning is a professional service that licensed plumbers can perform for you using tools such as motorized drain snakes and powerful hydro-jetting equipment. But when should you arrange for drain cleaning? There are two specific times, which we’ll look at below.

Yearly

As part of general maintenance for the plumbing in your household or business, having a drain cleaning professional to clean you drain should be a service that you have done once a year. This is a great preventive measure against all sorts of drain and sewer troubles. Using hydro-jetters, plumbers can so thoroughly scour away the organic gunk and other build-up on the drainpipe walls. Regular drain cleaning also helps to stop problems with high-water pressure, limescale from hard water, and bad-smelling drains.

Emergency Clogs

When you run into a clog in your sink or other drain in your house or business that you can’t get rid of using a plunger or a hand-crank drain snake is the time to call on professionals to completely clean the drain. Simply punching a hole through a clog to allow water through usually means the blockage will start up again a short time later. The complete scouring of the drain that you’ll receive from professional drain cleaning will not only get rid of the clogging, it will stop it from coming bac

2. Preventive Drain Cleaning Prevents Major Plumbing Problems

A clogged drain can be prevented if steps are taken to maintain your pipe systems. Using a drain cleaning product from time to time when no backup is present can slow down the buildup of debris. Putting steel mesh covers over the drain hole will catch solid matter before it gets into the pipes and causes a backup. Also, as part of weekly household maintenance, cleaning kitchen and bathroom drains with baking soda will make future unclogging easier.

Drain cleaning in commercial facilities presents maintenance and engineering managers with many challenges.

By understanding the most pressing drain-cleaning challenges related to both equipment and processes, homeowners and front-line technicians can develop solutions to prevent and detect these problems.

Points of entry

Problems related to drain cleaning can be curtailed at the entry points for drain systems.

Using toilets as wastebaskets creates recurring problems. Children drop toys in them, and adults use them to dispose of all manner of solid objects that end up caught in traps, causing overflows.

Floor drains are also often abused. Rather than sweep up solid trash before washing down garage and kitchen floors, cleaners often just hose down the floors, letting solid debris enter the sewer system and clog lines, overload settling basins and cause backups.

Commercial kitchens in health care and education facilities are especially hard on drains because of waste water that contains fats, oil and grease, which includes petroleum-based products and lotions. Foul odors are a nasty problem that results when decomposing food accumulates on top of hardened grease in grease traps. Ineffective grease trap pumping does not remove grease buildup but instead leaves crusted grease on trap walls.

3. Video Pipe Inspections: What They Are and Why We Do Them

Video pipe inspection equipment is one of the technologies the plumbing industry has moved into. When it comes to many basic jobs, the tools haven’t changed in decades. But video inspections have made it much easier for plumbers to diagnose and fix problems using the standard tools of the past.

About Video Pipe Inspections

Not that long ago, a plumber could not examine the inside of pipes. Trying to figure out where leaks were occurring, or finding out what was wrong with a pipe that was hidden under construction material or a concrete slab involved mostly educated guesswork—and a few mistakes.

Today, we live in a world with miniaturized cameras, and that gives plumbers the power to closely examine the interior of pipes. Video pipe inspection equipment consists of a digital camera and LED light mounted on the end of a long fiber-optic cable. A plumber sends the cable down into a drain or other access point, and then can watch the images sent back from the camera on a hi-def monitor. The plumber can get up close with the interior of the plumbing system.

Video pipe inspections are invaluable when it comes to locating pipe leaks. There’s no need to guess where the leaking pipe is located: the camera can find the exact spot the plumbers need to go. This eliminates needless damage to construction material when reaching the pipe. Video inspections are also useful for dealing with tough clogs. The plumber will find out what type of material is clogging up the pipe and discover the fastest way to deal with it. Video inspections saves time and make sure the plumbers get the job done right.

4. Portable Pipe Jetting is the Solution for Clogged Drain lines

Tough clogs are no match for a high-pressure pipe jetter. Plumbing professionals can now use high-pressure water to clear drain lines clogged with grease, sand, and sludge. This new tool helps the professional safely clean your pipes.

A High-pressure water drain cleaning devices works well for small-diameter lines. A lightweight jetter is easily portable and has a host of features such as a four-piece nozzle set and a faucet adapter. A flexible hose can easily slide around tight bends in small lines and down long runs.

5. Hire a Professional

Hiring a professional drain and sewer cleaning service may end up being a little more expensive than doing it yourself, but often, hiring a drain cleaning professional can save hundreds of dollars in the long run.

Drain cleaning professionals  have the plumbing tools and drain cleaning equipment, such as snakes and jetters, which most people don’t have around the home or office. A snake is a coil of wire that threads down pipes to break up blockage and clear clogged drains more quickly and easily. Sometimes, plumbers will have to completely open clogged drains to pump out water and debris.

Caring for and maintaining kitchen and bathroom drains saves money and time down the road. If the problem is something that can’t easily be fixed, it’s never hard to find certified professionals who are willing to help out.

Call 866-672-4337 To arrange for drain cleaning, either as regular service or in an emergency, call Radier Rooter We serve the Palm Beach and Broward County areas.