Kitchen drain crisis averted!

I always find it remarkable how procrastination has very intricate ways to get hold of us. For me there are at least two different types of reasons to procrastinate: the first one is the fear of failure, as we discussed some weeks ago; the second is just the amount of work, especially if it entails several sessions, because as long as the task is not started, it can wait, but once you have kicked it off you better dispatch it quickly. This morning, pushed by necessity, I broke a vicious circle of the first kind... and all worked out fine.

Over the last few months we has seen increasingly poorer performance in the drain of the kitchen sink. It is normal that, if you empty a big pot of water it will take some seconds to empty, just the way it happens on the bathtub. But once the water level starts to rise by just keeping water running you definitely know you are in trouble. When she first noticed this behavior some months ago, Karen was upset because it made the sink dirty!!! With the slow flow any leftover particle of grease will tend to stick to the wall or the bottom of the sink instead of being washed away, leaving visible smudges and requiring (more) frequent cleaning. So she grabbed for the bottle of Drano and poured a substantial amount into it, let it sit for ten minutes as per the instructions and rinse it away. There was not obvious improvement, but we decide to believe that it might perhaps get better over a day or two. It certainly did not get worse, so there was hope.

Photo: Benny Daon

A couple of months later, seeing that the situation had not improved, Karen repeated the procedure with approximately the same results. We had the gut feeling that things were getting worse in the long run, but did not have clear evidence for it. Then, about ten days ago, we started having trouble with the dishwasher. After finishing the washing cycle there was still a significant amount of water at the bottom. What is worse, probably because of the stagnant water, the pots and dishes in the lower tray were not properly washed. For a couple of days we were befuddled by this behavior and started to wonder if it was time to get a new dishwasher. However, the house is a rental, so we had not interest in paying for a new appliance out of our pocket. Luckily, we found that the ultra-fast rinse program managed to clear the water at the bottom, so that bought us some time.

It turns out that its dishwasher outlet is hooked to the drain of the sink just under the sink, so if we poured enough water in the sink while the drain is clogged the level rose and part of the water ended up flowing back into the dishwasher. This discovery was a relief (the dishwasher did not have to be replaced) and a wake-up call (the drain had to be cleared, and soon), but this all happened in the evening last Friday, and calling someone to help us on Saturday morning would have been prohibitively expensive so we decided to take it easy on water consumption over the weekend and give it a try today.

Seeing that there was not way around it, I crawled under the sink and started pulling pieces apart, starting at the bottom of the sink. There were a few deposits of muck, but nothing that would explain the level of clogging that we were seeing. Besides, clearing these deposits did not solve the problem, so I continued downstream. Dismounting the siphon was a bit of a mess, because it naturally contains a certain amount of water, but it was not clogged. This also explained why the Drano did not help: in all likelihood most of it stayed in the siphon and did not make it any further. Going further down I found out that the sink was connected to the wall through a flexible PVC pipe, pretty much like the one coming from the dishwasher, only thicker.

Now that I come to think about it, the house was fully renovated when we moved in about six years ago, so it is possible that the plumbing was different in the original floor plan and they had no better solution that using a flexible pipe to have the drain connected. When I pushed the drain snake into the flexible pipe I noticed some resistance but luckily, after some pushing and pulling something dislodged and I manage to push the whole thing in, so the problem was solved. 

All that was left was putting the pieces back together and making sure that there was no leak, but I made quick of it and the whole thing took me only slightly over an hour. I could have done this months ago! And the good part is, if (when) this happens again I am now much better prepared to handle the work. Have a nice evening!