Where did you spend your New Year’s eve? Oh well, under the sink ;-)
We came home from our trip to a clogged up sink, or we clogged it up by throwing out leftover food.
I tried chemicals first, which wasn’t easy to come by on New Year’s Eve close to midnight.
They didn’t help, so I remembered the time I helped my father working on a sink and I opened the U shaped pipe. It was clean, therefore the problem was further down the line. I fell into bed at 2am with water standing in the sink.
Next morning the water was gone, but only temporarily.
Next I consulted the internet, should have done it from the beginning. Turns out baking soda and vinegar does the job as good as the chemicals, alas two rounds of that combination didn’t help either.
Calling a plumber would have been so much easier, but by now it was personal. How dare this clogged sink being stronger than my amateur plumbing skills honed in my childhood with my father?
Back to the internet, especially help videos. They showed how to use a snake. Got a 25 feet long one at Home Depot. Put it in 20 feet, pulled it out again and still it was clogged.
O.K. I guess it is time for the professional with the 50 feet snake :-(
By that time it was 1.30 on New Year’s day, I didn’t even had real breakfast yet.
Before admitting defeat I did a last ditch attempt and snaked the snake in all the 25 feet. Put my electric drill at the end and turned it a couple of times in both directions. I took the snake out and used my last baking soda/vinegar reserves plus half a gallon of boiling water as the first liquid to come down the drain and to my surprise it didn’t back up anymore :-)
Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern.