Kitchen Blog

No matter if you are renting or buying your home, everyone ends up with a clogged kitchen sink once in a while. Is your sink or tub draining slowly? You may be able to clean it out instead of buying some caustic and dangerous chemical. In a sink the main culprit is hair caught in the sink stopper arm. Under your sink there is the drain pipe, most people never see the stopper arm behind the pipe, but that arm runs inside the pipe to pivot the stopper up and down. Well that is where most of the hair problem is.

You can fix most stopped-up sinks without calling in a plumber. The next step, you can reach behind the pipe and unscrew the stopper arm. Before you pull it out grab the top of the stopper with your other hand or put in item that won’t fall into the pipe under the stopper to make easier to remove. Then remove the stopper arm behind the pipe and pull the stopper out of the sink above. You also need to remove the U trap at the bottom of the pipe coming from the sink.

It’s not finished yet. Be patience and keep your determination up! There is a hand tighten threaded ring at each end of the U pipe, put a pan under the pipe to catch any water that WILL come out. Unscrew both rings and remove the U pipe. You can now see from the top of the sink drain to the cabinet bottom (drain pan you put there) unless it is clogged tight with hair. Then all you need to do is use some old coax TV cable to push or pull the hair out.