Our home is a place to come home to and relax. It’s a place that deals with our daily comings and goings, which means it is put under a lot of stress over the years. Things start to become less clean or pristine, and drains are the first area that tends to suffer. Here are some tips to help avoid blocking your drains and causing plenty of costly problems in the process.
Don’t Flush Hair Down The Drains
The key to keeping hair from going down your drains is to catch it before it gets there. That makes your daily shower a little less relaxing when you’re conscious of every hair going down the drain. It’s worth getting a hair catcher to place at the base of the plug, which can help collect the majority of the hair. Yes, perhaps one or two are going to slip past, but you can’t get it all. And instead of flushing that hair down the toilet (because they’re both going down the drain), it’s important to collect it and throw it into the bin. To avoid those plumbing costs, do this every time you shower, and that should stop the majority of the build-up.
Regularly Use Chemicals
Some chemicals are good for destroying sludge and build-ups of hair and other materials that end up getting down the drain. You should try and avoid using chemical-based products on the surfaces you touch and opt for ones that are safer and more kind on the environment. However, drains are one place within the home that you won’t see and will never get cleaned properly unless you regularly use these chemicals. Try bleach around the toilet area and down sinks. There are specific products that are said to work the best on disintegrating hair.
Put Food In The Bin
Washing food particles down the sink, especially when they’re quite sizeable, isn’t going to help your drainage system. Some foods take a long time to break down, and instead of washing down the drain, some of it will cling to the pipes. Put as much of the food as you can in the bin before putting it into the sink or dishwasher to wash. Whenever you are washing up plates that have had food on them, run the hot water after every wash for a good minute or two. This will help flush out everything properly, and you can even add a little bit of washing up liquid down there too in order to help it move along.
Use Home Products For Additional Cleaning
There are plenty of products in the home that you can use to continue cleaning your home. Two of which are baking soda and vinegar. Both do very well in breaking down hard to reach places within the drain, and to ensure that everything down there is destroyed properly.
Blocked drains can sometimes be a nightmare, but most can be sorted with a little DIY from you. If it doesn’t look as if it’s shifting, then get a professional in.