Sink or Tub Draining Slowly

What is in there

In a bathroom sink the plug is usually a rope of hair wrapped around the pop-up stopper rod, coated in toothpaste and soap scum. In a tub or shower it is the same rope caught on the cross bars under the strainer or in the drum of the trip-lever drain. In a kitchen sink it is grease that went down warm, cooled in the trap arm and caught coffee grounds and rice. On the jobs we take in Milton, nine slow single-fixture drains out of ten are cleared within two feet of the drain opening.

What you can safely try

1. Pull the pop-up stopper. On most bathroom sinks the rod comes out once the pivot nut at the back of the drain body is backed off, slide the rod out and lift the stopper straight up.
2. Clean the stopper and fish the drain with a plastic barbed strip. Expect a grey clump that smells worse than it looks.
3. For a tub, unscrew the overflow plate and pull the trip-lever linkage; hair wraps the bottom plunger.
4. For a kitchen sink, set a bucket below the P-trap, spin both slip nuts off by hand and tip the trap out.

Skip the caustic drain openers. They rarely clear a hair plug, they sit in the trap, and they burn the hands of whoever opens the pipe next, which is often us.

Signs it is further down

• The sink and the tub beside it are both slow, so the shared branch is plugged.
• The kitchen sink is slow and the dishwasher leaves water in its tub.
• Water rises in the tub when the toilet is flushed: that is the main drain, not the tub.

What we do on the call

We pull the trap and the stopper first, then run a quarter-inch or five-sixteenths cable down the trap arm toward the stack. On a kitchen line packed with grease we cable it and flush with hot water, and if it keeps coming back we camera the branch to look for a belly or a section of old galvanized pipe closing up from the inside. Before we leave we fill each fixture to the overflow and pull the plug to watch it empty.