Rocketman Plumbing, a respected team of plumbers in Albuquerque, New Mexico, offers fast repairs done right. We handle your residential and commercial HVAC and plumbing needs to keep your home or business comfortable all year long. Today, we’re going to talk about what you can do to prevent, or at least slow down, how many drain backups you have.
Types of Drains That Can Backup
There’s different pipes and drains that can back up in your house, but these four are the most common ones that we handle for our customers:
- Kitchen sink
- Shower or bathtub
- Toilet
- Main sewer line
1. How to Prevent Shower Backups
The most common thing that clogs showers or bathtubs is hair (unless you have small children, then sometimes it’s toys). You can get a little screen to put over your bathtub or shower drain that catches 90-95% of the hair that goes down the drain. That will help prevent shower backups.
2. How to Prevent Kitchen Sink Backups
Lots of people have garbage disposals in their kitchen sinks. Some people think that a garbage disposal is made to dispose of garbage, and lots of people overuse their garbage disposal because of that mistake. Even if you have a garbage disposal, if you throw more food particles down your drain than it was made for, it will plug up. The best thing for kitchen sinks is to not overuse your garbage disposal. Put all you can in the trash before you do your dishes, and use the garbage disposal for the smaller bits leftover.
3. How to Prevent Toilet Backups
Some people might not like this, but good toilet paper is not necessarily good for your toilet or your drain lines. It doesn’t dissolve. It’s more like paper towels, which you should never throw down your drain. So if you have a problem with your toilet backing up, you might want to try cheap, dollar store, one-ply toilet paper, and I bet you’ll notice it makes a difference.
4. How to Prevent Main Sewer Line Backups
If your main sewer line is backing up often, something is wrong. Either something’s wrong with the sewer line itself, or things are going down the sewer line that shouldn’t be going down there. We can run our camera down the main line and see what we find. Sometimes it’s roots growing into the sewer line, which need to be removed and repair the sewer line. But a lot of times, we find paper towels or baby wipes. Some of those wipes say “flushable” on the box, but if the sewer line backs up, they’re not flushable for you. Your sewer line can’t handle them, so you shouldn’t flush them.
Call Rocketman for Expert Drain Unclogging
Be careful of what you put down your drains and you’ll notice that they will not back up nearly as much. But if they do back up, call Rocketman Plumbing at 505-375-6602 and we’ll come out and take care of it for you in a flash.