When Might You Need A Drain Machine?

The drains in residential settings are constantly subject to an onslaught of adverse factors that could result in a clog or slow draining. There are so many different things that get sent down the average drain on a daily basis that it can sometimes seem surprising that drains can be as resilient as they are. Sometimes, these obstructions can get relatively out of hand and might require the help of some backup to get them flowing freely again. Occasionally, when good practices in drain maintenance fail and you experience more stubborn obstacles to drain function, you might need to call on the help of a drain machine to power through the obstructions.

Usually, and this rings true especially for most smaller-scale residential settings when a drain is moving slowly or even stopped entirely, it doesn’t take too much more than a hand drain auger and some grit to get everything operational again. In fact, if the issue is a slower line, good practices and habits can restore the drain to a more operational state and prevent the occurrence from repeating itself in the future. Much of preventing obstructions to drain lines comes down to being judicious about what you let get down the drain in the first place and preventing too much from accumulating and becoming a real issue.

While you won’t really need a drain machine to take on most drain obstructions (in fact, for many smaller clogs you won’t) there are times when you’re going to need to call upon the strength of a quality machine to power through obstructions and restore drain lines to a state of normalcy. Here are some of the more stubborn clogs that can be experienced in residential and commercial settings that sometimes accumulate in drain lines and necessitate the utility of some additional firepower to get them up and running again.

1. Hair Clogs
Hair is an interesting material for quite a number of reasons. Perhaps the least interesting of the reasons about to be enumerated considering the circumstances is the fact that people produce hair - and plenty of it. People produce lots of hair, and that’s readily apparent to anyone who has ever taken a finer look at what’s hanging around pretty much any bathroom.

Yes, hair is a commonly encountered product of bathrooms and domiciles everything, and a common culprit implicated in sink clogs, shower clogs and more. But the fact that people produce so much of it is only one small portion of its interest as a subject.

Another thing that makes hair so interesting - so curiously well suited to producing truly wondrous clogs of impressive proportions - is that fact that hair is remarkably tough to break that. That doesn’t make it impervious to drain care, but it definitely makes it very difficult to deal with when it does become the prime culprit of drain obstruction.

Although hair can be dealt with using some conventional drain care techniques, for the most part, it just sticks around forever. If you’re lucky, any hair that makes it to your sink or shower drain will flow down the pipes where it will no longer be a problem of yours. If it does manage to gain a foothold in one of your pipes, you may very well be in for a serious obstruction.

Most of preventing clogs that result from an accumulation of hair come down to good practices. It’s advisable to use drain guards to catch as much errant hair as possible since it will be more difficult to deal with once it makes its way down a drain.

Hair, therefore, is the first of many culprits that can cause drain obstructions that may very well require a drain machine to remove. It is tough, builds up over time, and interacts with other obstructions in a most insidious manner indeed.

There is another thing that makes hair so interesting - and that is its interaction with other materials commonly implicated in the formation of drain clogs, but we’ll touch on that in a moment.

2. Soap
Name some things that are ubiquitously present in bathrooms. A sink, a toilet, a bath mat, some towels? Sure, but now name some things that can fit down a drain. We already have covered hair, and that leaves the next contender on our list that frequently becomes a problem when it finds its way down a drain in an appreciable quantity.

Every bathroom has soap in various forms, and we all use it somehow. In addition, soap is, by the very nature of the way we use it going to find its way down the drain somehow or other. No one is throwing soap and soap scum out the window, and if they did, after a while they’d wish they had let it down the drain anyway.

Yes, as necessary as soap is, it is very much a burden on drain lines and sometimes necessitates an arduous removal with a drain machine. Many soaps are made with fat (more on that soon) in a process called saponification that converts them into the soap we use in our daily lives. When soap mixes with water it can create soap scum, which is ironic at the very least since soap is intended to be a cleaner.

And ironic though it is, soap scum is no laughing matter. It is a destroyer of fixtures and finishes and is the bane of plumbing. Though it can make drains move slowly, soap scum on its very own typically is not the only one to blame when a clog does arise. There’s another villain afoot. A co-conspirator if you will.

Yes, in the bathroom soap scum is typically in cahoots with hair. As we mentioned earlier, it is the way that hair interacts with other agents that makes it so interesting. Not only does hair create monumental blockages on its own, but it creates a lattice, a network even, that does a remarkable job of trapping other nefarious propagators of blockages. Basically what you end up with is a lattice of hair saturated with another substance (in this case soap scum) that can create one wicked crazy clog.

Soap scum builds slowly over time and can be very difficult to remove, but as mentioned is at its worst when its partner in crime is hair. When you are working with a hair-and-soap-scum obstruction, there is a fairly high likelihood that you may need to call on drain cleaning machines to help you power on through to the other side.

Yet, as insidious as soap scum can prove to be - and it can be quite insidious, it lacks one of the sneaky elements of the next pollutant we are about to explore - one that might also very well require the help of a drain machine.

3. Grease and Fat
We mentioned that it was the very chemical makeup of soap that made it possible to form the obstructions that it did, and now we have circled back to the maker. Greases and fats can create some of the most obstinate drain obstructions out there, and they can really make for trouble when they go unchecked.

Generally, we’re going to switch from bathrooms to kitchens and commercial food production here, so we’ll be dealing with different settings. Grease and fat, when they are involved in the making of a drain obstruction, have a trick up their sleeve that hair and even soap somewhat lack.

Greases and fats tend to go down the drain as unassuming liquids. And since they’re usually the result of various forms of food preparation, they tend to be sent down the drain using heat, sometimes as the result of cooking. But all that grease and fat that went smoothly down the drain as a liquid has a real trump card in its hand.

All that liquid fat is just waiting for the chance to freeze on contact with a cool environment, which it is effectively guaranteed to experience somewhere within your drain lines. Sure, they go down the drain in liquid form, but a few meters down there on contact with cold lines they’ll freeze up and create one monstrous blockage. Often what happens is only a little bit will congeal at a time, which means that slowly you’ll be building a serious clog that you might not notice until it’s too late.

The thing that makes greases and fats so obstinate is very much like what makes soap scum so tough. It’s often not just the grease and fat that you have to face - it’s everything else trapped in the matrix of congealed grease. Sometimes this is hair, and sometimes it’s all the other detritus that happens to get sent down the drain.

Either way, it doesn’t really matter when you have a need to clear it. Grease and fat make some of the toughest obstructions out there especially when they’re paired with other debris. It’s another situation in which you’re probably going to need to call on the help of a drain machine to get through.

4. Tree Roots
Tree roots can make the clog to end all clogs. They are immensely tough and they can introduce themselves where they weren’t expected and far out of the reach of anything but the most capable machines. Besides, what are tree roots but a metaphoric alternative to hair? Much like hair, they accumulate over time, and they can also trap other debris in a drain line to make some serious clogs. They do exactly what hair does in a drain, except with a few key differences.

Perhaps the most aggravating difference between hair and tree roots is the fact that tree roots put themselves there and are entirely unbidden. Sure, people produce a lot of hair that tends to make its way down drains, but preventative measures can also be taken to mitigate the effects of hair in a drain. You can put down traps and catchers to prevent hair from getting down the drain, but you can’t prevent tree roots from making their way into lines with the same measures.

Here’s another thing - tree roots grow. It’s like a malicious design against the function of plumbing. Not only can tree roots make their way into sewer and plumbing lines through no fault of the owner and despite their preventative measures but to add insult to injury tree roots do nothing but get thicker and propagate themselves over time.

And, on top of that, as a lattice of tree roots works its way into a line and creates a labyrinthine mess, it will ensnare all the other things flowing through the drain, resulting in a scaled-up version of a hair based blockage.

Tree roots, especially when paired with substances like grease or fat, can make some serious obstructions that will severely restrict the functioning of drains. Drain machines are commonly called upon to help deal with tree roots, not only because of the resilience of tree roots but for the fact that they can occur very far down in lines.

Those are four different types of drain obstructions that can require you to call on the help of a study drain machine to help you get through them. They often work together and, in fact, most drain clogs are the result of a combination of factors, such as hair and soap scum or tree roots and grease. Yet many more substances can make very nasty clogs in drain lines, and many of them can necessitate the use of a drain machine just the same. Toilet paper, paper towels, coffee grounds, mineral scum and other toiletries can all result in very serious clogs.

There is some good news in all of this. If you ever experience a drain clog that defies conventional tactics, you’re in the right place to find a drain cleaning machine. Our drain cleaning machines are some of the toughest in the industry and our own machines are guaranteed for 2 years of service - a remarkable guarantee, and a pledge of our faith in the quality of our products.

We offer a suite of upright, sled, and sink machines to help you handle some of the toughest clogs out there, so if you have any questions on the capabilities of any of our machines, give us a call at 800-247-4081.