A Fresh Start From The Holidays Or Anytime With A Drain Cleaning Service | Boerne, TX
Photo By skynesher at istock
Just like shoes in mud season, drain pipes get clogged up and messy over time. Instead of mud, though, the root of drain clogs is “FOG” as we call it, or fat, oils, and grease. No matter what else is in the mix such as hair, paper, or sanitary products, FOG is what makes them really stick and build up. At bluefrog Plumbing + Drain of San Antonio, we can clear out your kitchen drains in Boerne, TX, after holiday cooking, or expand to your bathrooms and even whole-house drain cleaning service, which many homeowners order annually to help avoid emergency plumbing calls from complex drain issues. After all, clogs don’t just form near the surface close to your sink, toilet, or shower, they also build up over time deep within your wastewater system, slowing things down until you experience their effects closer to where you cook or brush your teeth with backups and stopped-up drains.
Types of Drain Cleaning Service
The most popular drain cleaning service for many plumbers, unfortunately, is emergency kind, often at awkward times like late at night, or during the football break after Thanksgiving dinner. Sinks and other plumbing backs up and sometimes overflows, and our team shows up and gets the plumbing flowing again. Sometimes it’s a quick resolution of a local blockage, but sometimes the problem is deeper down the drain pipes, and takes some time, long snakes and augers, and even hydro jetting to blast clear.
Preventive drain cleaning service is designed to clear the deeper clogs as well as freshen up the sink and toilet plumbing near the fixture itself, and is available for limited areas such as all your bathrooms, just your kitchen to take care of all the grease and the clogs that develop around it, or for your whole house to make sure you’re protected against the domino effect of messy drain pipes in the coming year. If we do get a call from a whole-house drain cleaning client, it’s usually for a plastic toy, wad of paper, or cell phone down the toilet, or a similar routine clog that arose recently and doesn’t take long to address.
Thinking About Your Home’s Wastewater System
Your home’s plumbing is complex, and the drain portion is something like the interstate highway system passing through a major city. You might get blocked up on an on ramp and have some delays, but they’re easy to clear. Blockages on the highways themselves tend to lead to backups on many ramps and other roads, and in the right spot you can get a major mess with no way for the traffic to clear. That’s about what happens with drain clogs in your home, but our drain cleaning service can do something about it in this case, by making sure the main highways are clear and are likely to stay clear into the future. Our plumbers can also pay attention to potential sources of trouble that are unique to certain parts of your plumbing, kind of like merging sections of your highway. We know the details of how your plumbing is constructed, and can attend to issues like pipe damage, plumbing vent problems, and poorly installed sections of drain pipe that can result in repeat drain issues as well.
Special Cases of Drain Trouble That Professionals Recognize
It makes sense that people tend to pick up a plunger when there’s drain trouble because that can sometimes make a difference. Hopefully, they don’t use chemicals because plungers and chemicals often don’t solve the whole problem, and chemicals make a hazard for the professionals who come along to finish the job with a full drain cleaning service.
One somewhat surprising source of what looks like drain clogs, usually on the upper floor of a multi-story home, is a blockage such as a bird’s nest in the plumbing vent on the roof. The drain system draws in air through the vent to help it flow, and when the air supply is reduced or stopped, you’ll have blocked sink drains or gurgling when the toilet tries to flush, and possible sewer gas odors from the blocked vent, too.
Other issues that cause drain build-up and clogs include corroded pipes that tend to gather more material inside and horizontal pipes that aren’t installed quite right with a bit of tilt, which allow material to settle as the wastewater flows through. We can see these issues with our video inspection equipment, and address them as necessary.
Video Inspection and Your Drain Cleaning Service Results
An essential part of many modern drain cleaning service visits is snaking our tiny video camera through the drains to identify clogs. This helps us select the right tool in our arsenal to remove them. Some clogs just need breaking up, possibly with a blast of high-pressure hydro jet to move them on down the pipes. Other clogs are formed from objects, which need to be removed because they aren’t likely to decay over time or be broken up and send down the line. A typical example might be a plastic toy.
Video inspection can also help us see the condition of your drain pipes, checking for possible leaks which can result in expensive and hazardous cleanup. We also see corrosion and degradation that not only encourages clogs and indicates leaks are likely in the future, but suggests that high-pressure hydro jetting might not be appropriate for these more delicate pipes in decay. These problems can be found in all types of pipes, from copper and cast iron to PVC. With video, we can help you anticipate pipe problems and plan repairs if needed.
Your Drain Experts and Plumbing Professionals in Boerne, TX
At bluefrog Plumbing + Drain of San Antonio, we provide our Boerne, TX customers with expert drain cleaning service and maintenance, and experienced plumbing services of all kinds. Give us a call and tell us how we can help.
Priority Service