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The smooth flow of water in your home is so important. Imagine your main bathroom’s toilet is clogged and won’t flush. That’s just one example of the need to quickly call a reputable drain cleaning service in Chattanooga, TN. When you think about it, lots of areas in the home depend on water flowing freely down your drains. Here are the most common home areas that might require you to contact a trusted service before a small problem becomes a huge headache.

Bathroom Sinks

Combining or brushing your hair in front of your bathroom mirror above the sink often leads to some stray strands falling into the bowl and getting rinsed down the drain. Over time, the collected hairs that can accumulate and form a clog.

Hair isn’t the only culprit causing people to call a drain cleaning service for their bathroom sinks. This is the spot where you also use globs of toothpaste every day that’s spit out into the sink, goes down the drain, and adds to the clog formation. Added to hair and toothpaste is a gooey combination of soap, dirt, hair products like gel or mousse, and skin flakes. All of that scum can cling to the walls of the drain’s pipes or get stuck on the pivot rod, stopper or trap, stopping or slowing the flow of water down the sink’s drain.

Bathroom Showers and Tubs

If you’ve ever taken a shower and felt the water creeping up around your ankles instead of circling rapidly down the drain, you know that the drains in your bathtubs or stall showers can also become blocked. Sometimes the blockage is quite severe, and the standing water will drain so slowly that it’s still sitting there, looking murky and soapy, for quite a while after you’ve finished showering or bathing.

The usual suspects for these clogs are similar to those causing sink blockages: a build-up of soap scum, dirt, and hair. Long hair together with soap scum can especially contribute to bulk of the obstruction, as longer hair more easily attaches to the pipe walls with the help of the sticky soap scum. If the situation isn’t addressed with assistance from Chattanooga, TN, drain cleaning service, a bathroom floor can flood or water can begin to leak through shower joints.

A drain cleaning service can also detect whether the issue is truly the result of a simple clogged drain or if there is a more extensive and serious blockage in a main sewer line.

Toilets

In terms of plumbing issues, there’s nothing much more frustrating than having a clogged toilet. This is especially true if there’s only one bathroom in the home. A toilet can get backed up for a number of reasons.

Your toilet may be an older, low-flow model that doesn’t have adequate pressure to get all of the waste past the trap and drain, which can lead to blockages. Someone may attempt to flush items down the toilet that are not meant to be flushed, such as cotton balls, certain types of wet wipes, or cotton swabs.

The lower bowl unit of your porcelain toilet fixture contains a trap that is meant to hold standing water and prevent sewer gas from passing into your home. When something like too much toilet paper or non-flushable items become stuck in this internal trap, it causes a clog. Toilets also use roof vents to bring fresh air into your home’s plumbing system. This stops air-pressure vacuums from occurring and keeps drains flowing nicely. But if the vents get clogged with natural debris, such as leaves and sticks, the toilet vents will become blocked, reducing drain flow and causing clogs. Your best bet is to call a drain cleaning service to clear things up.

One other potential cause of clogged toilets requiring a professional drain cleaning service is when waste build-up has caused a clog in the main drain and the sewer lines. Even growing tree roots can damage a sewer line and let dirt and debris create a blockage.

Laundry Rooms

The laundry room in your home is also susceptible to clogging. You probably have a washing machine, dryer, and a utility sink in this area. The utility sink is often used for heavy-duty cleaning jobs that can let large chunks of waste and dirt into the drain lines, sometimes leading to jam-ups.

Your washing machine can also get clogged. Often fibers can get loosened off clothing or other laundry items. It also becomes a problem when some family members forget to remove stuff from their pockets before laundering pants, shirts, or jackets. These items, such as crumpled tissues, gum wrappers, and pieces of paper add to the accumulated bits of debris and get trapped inside drain pipes, causing a backflow of sudsy or grimy water and a very big mess.

Some people’s laundry rooms have a floor drain, especially in newer homes. This is a drain usually placed in the middle of the laundry in order to prevent clogged washing machine overflows from damaging floors and walls. These floor drains are particularly useful in laundry rooms built on a home’s first or second story, rather than in the basement. Get a drain cleaning service to install a floor drain in your second story laundry room if you don’t already have one.

Basements

Stepping into your basement and realizing the floor is covered in water is not a happy scenario. It means something is very wrong, and you will more than likely need a drain cleaning service to get at the root of the problem. A lot of basements have helpful floor drains to get rid of wastewater from all of those appliances that can cause floods, like washing machines, air conditioning units, and water heating tanks.

Water can be leaking from the pipework up in the basement’s ceiling. There may have been a burst water line on your property or beneath the concrete that now has water filling your basement. A sewer or water line can clog and get backed up, causing water or waste to leak. The pressure of the water, if unchecked, can possibly even crack and break the lines, requiring some major repair work to be done.

If you suspect you have a clogged drain anywhere in your home, contact Metro Plumbing, Heating & Drain cleaning service.