Adventures With A Slow Shower Drain
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by Dan on 25 April 2009
I live in an older apartment, the type of apartment that landlords like to refer to as "vintage." And while vintage might initially evoke images of some charming, historic building, in my case it simply means that the drains in my apartment hate me.
Shortly after moving in, I discovered that the drain in my shower didn't believe in draining faster than the shower. No, it insisted, I should just learn to enjoy standing in a few inches of water by the time my shower finished. And so began my wonderful adventure.
My first thought was that hair had just clogged up the drain, which would be easy enough to resolve. So I grabbed a snake and began trying to unscrew the overflow plate. Partway through, one of the screws just snapped in half! What I had not realized was that the overflow plate had not been unscrewed in quite some time and the screws had rusted.
To make matters worse, there was no hair clog that I could reach with the snake, so something else was causing the slowness. Of course, the more pressing issue at this point was to get the overflow plate back on. I used a hacksaw to cut off most of the broken screw, then I used a drill to drill into the remnant of the old screw to give a new screw something to grab onto.
My next attempt to clear the drain involved buying chemical drain cleaners - both the "goo" and "foaming" kinds. Neither had any noticeable effect, besides making a bit of a mess.
Finally, I decided to just try plunging the drain (which in retrospect probably should have been my first step!). And surprise, surprise, this worked best: the drain was actually draining better. Unfortunately, after a few weeks of use the drain starts slowing down again, so the plunging has become a regular thing.
I've also tried the "enzymatic" drain cleaners, which seem like they might help a little bit, although I haven't had the discipline to use it consistently enough to really tell if it works.
One particular time the plunging wasn't working like it usually did, and the blockage got so bad that water wasn't going down at all. Eventually the landlord had to call a plumber who used an electric snake to clear the blockage. For a while after this the drain was the best it had ever been, and I wondered if maybe my days of plunging were over. But within a few months the drain had slowed down again, and it took more plunging to make it better.
Has anyone else had experience with older drains and ways to keep them from constantly slowing down? Or is this just part of the deal with an older building and older pipes?
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Comments
Sue on 5 May 2009
I, too, had the same problem -even went so far as to have a plumber to re-plumb everything under the house--it helped but did not solve the problem. The plumber advised me that the drain hole in my old tub was a lot smaller than the new tubs have so it can't drain as fast as the new shower heads and/or water spouts can now put forth a faster water flow therefore not compatible with the older tub and shower drains.
chuck on 14 July 2009
try this: Homemade Drano Without The Harsh Chemicals
http://lifehacker.com/5304684/homemade-drano-without-the-harsh-chemicals