Category: Home Tips

We all know we’re not supposed to pour used cooking oil, bacon fat, or other grease products down the drain, but we do it anyway.  And The Scottish Plumber knows we do it anyway because we are often called to open kitchen drains when they get clogged, and remove globs and globs of solidified cooking grease.  We recently replaced some kitchen pipes for a remodeling project and peered through a section of drainpipe after it was removed.  A layer of solidified oils and fats had reduced the width of the pipe to only 3/4 of an inch.  It was only a matter of time before a small piece of food lodged itself in the grease and caused a clog!

Even if you run lots of hot water and soap down the drain while pouring the oil, it’s still going to collect on the pipe walls and turn into a sludge that is hard to remove from your pipes- often requiring high-pressure water jetting.  But if we’re not supposed to pour greasy and oily substances down our drains, then what do we do with them?  During the Great Depression, families would often re-use their cooking oil several times before discarding it; and during WWII, families used to save their bacon fat in jars and donate them to the war effort- where factories would use the fat to create glycerin for explosives.

Today, you can still use your cooking oil more than once if it was lightly used and you strain it through a fine mesh strainer or cheesecloth.  Some municipalities also have recycling centers or drop-off points for used cooking oil to be safely disposed or re-used.  Keep a sealable container like a peanut butter jar or pickle jar (either glass or plastic if you’re afraid glass will break) near your sink, and after the oil has cooled enough (especially if you’re using a plastic bottle- you don’t want to melt the plastic), carefully pour the grease into the jar.  When the jar is full you can throw it in the garbage if it’s small, or find a disposal location.

You can use the grease in a compost heap if you have one, or take it to your local landful or hazardous waste facility (the same place you would take paints, batteries, chemicals and CFL bulbs).  Ask your local city government or municipality office for locations to dispose of used cooking oil or grease.  Some restaurants will even take the oil to include it with their own disposed oil for recycling- restaurants that use large quantities of oil for frying are required to pay for a service that picks up their used oil and disposes of it safely- ask a restaurant if you can bring yours to include in their disposed oil.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and families across the country are gathering together and cooking huge meals… then cleaning up after those meals and sending bits of turkey fat, cranberry sauce, and potatoes down their garbage disposals.  As drain cleaners and plumbers, one of our busiest days of the year is the day after Thanksgiving.  Instead of Black Friday shopping, a lot of people in the Chicago area stand over clogged kitchen sinks, calling us to come out and clear their drains.

Taking care of a lot of holiday meal preparation (and cleaning up the aftermath) near the kitchen sink is a huge temptation to send large pieces of food into the garbage disposal and down the drain.  Even the toughest disposals on the market today still only turn food into a mush, which makes it easier to slide down a drain, but it can never be a liquid- which means overloading a drain with too much food can clog it.  Especially starchy foods like potato peelings, which can expand and thicken the water around it; and celery, which is stringy and hard for a disposal to thoroughly chop up- it can be pretty easy to overwork a disposal and clog a drain on Thanksgiving Day.

You can prevent this by limiting the amount of food you send down the disposal.  Avoid pouring gravy down the drain, turkey parts, skins, bones, and other greasy substances which can quickly build up and cause a clog.  Throw meat and bones in the trash in a tightly-sealed bag to keep raccoons and other animals from sniffing it out and tearing through it in the trash can.  Vegetables and other large pieces of food should be thrown in the trash.  Or if you have a garden, you may want to look into creating a small compost heap or sealed compost bin.  Even in cold weather, organic materials like fruits and vegetables (just about any food except meats and greases) can be composted and turned into great fertilizer for a garden.

With family in town and kids visiting from college with full laundry baskets a lot more people are doing laundry and taking showers this weekend, so take care of your drains and watch for signs of slow-moving water.

Happy Thanksgiving from The Scottish Plumber!

Sometimes a completely clogged bathtub drain can be plunged free- using a toilet plunger.  Plunging a bathtub drain works by forcing a pocket of water or air through the pipe to break up or loosen the clog- which is most often made up of hair and collections of soap in a bathtub.

To plunge the drain well, place the plunger over the top of the drain so that it covers it completely and forms a tight seal against the tub.

Plunge the drain with quick thrusts, about 10 times.  You can also start by filling the tub with a half inch or inch deep layer of hot water, to help tighten the seal around the drain and force the air or water pocket to move the clog.

What can also help get a tight seal is to cover the overflow drain below the faucet.  Cover it with a wet cloth, or remove the face plate to stuff a wet cloth just in the opening.  This can help create an even tighter seal to make the plunging more effective.

Kitchen sinks get a lot of food particles and other debris washed down the drain, especially if you have a garbage disposal.  There are a number of “home remedies” people prescribe for their stinky drains, and sometimes they can successfully tame a mild odor.

Baking soda eliminates various odors around a home: for your kitchen sink, pour about a cup of baking soda down the drain and let it sit for about 20 minutes. Then run extremely hot water down the drain.  Or, boil a large pot of water and carefully pour it down the drain (alone, or after the baking soda treatment).  Instead of baking soda, some people suggest using salt, or chopping orange or lemon peels in the disposal and rinsing them down the drain.

Especially in the case of the boiling water remedy, what you are trying to do is cut through some of the grease that’s trapped in the pipe.  Of all the drains in a home, kitchen sinks are the most likely to have layers of grease and oils built up inside them, and the odor you smell is from the decaying grease or food that has been stuck in the layers of grease and is rotting away.

We’ve found that the best remedy for a smelly kitchen sink is to remove the grease.  This can be done with a thorough drain cleaning or hydro-jetting, or a regular dose of Bio-Clean.  Bio-Clean is an environmentally friendly drain cleaner that uses safe micro bacteria to eat away at grease.  Using this regularly keeps grease from building up and odors from forming.

Everyone has met a toilet like this before… you flush, and the water seems to just slowly swirl around for a while, and you wait and wait anxiously for what seems like days (though it’s only a few seconds) to see if it will actually flush or (oh no!) overflow. The best way to describe this toilet is “lazy,” because it seems lethargic and slow in its flushing and like something isn’t quite right in the flushing process. It might even take a few flushes to get whatever’s in the bowl to leave the toilet.

The first thing to determine is if there is a clog in the toilet or if it’s a mechanical issue in the tank. To rule out a clog in the line, take a full bucket of water and pour it into the toilet rapidly. If there is no clog in the line, the sudden addition of excess water should drain quickly and keep the water level in the bowl consistent. If this causes the toilet to overflow, your line may be clogged. Plunge the toilet or call The Scottish Plumber to clear the drain.

If you poured a bucket of water down the toilet and it drained quickly, then there is probably not a clog in the pipe. Sometimes water can slowly swirl around the bowl if some of the ports are clogged. The ports are the small holes around the inside of the toilet bowl that feed the water from the tank into the bowl. Over time, lime, calcium, and other mineral deposits may build up and clog the holes. Try poking through them with a small screwdriver to clean them out and see if this helps.

Sometimes a toilet cleaning tab you place in the tank can shrink down and get stuck in a port. If you have placed one of these in your tank recently, check to see if a small piece of it got suck in a port.

Like any clog, a clogged dishwasher starts with some troubleshooting.  There are a few different reasons why a dishwasher can clog, and some of them are simple enough for you to unclog yourself.  One of the most common causes of a clogged dishwasher is simply some debris in or on the drain.  Let’s start there.

Look for the drain on the bottom of the inside of the dishwasher.  Remove the racks if you need to get to it, and make sure the dishwasher has been off for a while and the heating elements are off and have completely cooled so you do not burn yourself.  Check to see if there is any debris (such as food from dirty plates placed in the dishwasher) on the drain blocking its flow and remove it.  The dishwasher may also have a plastic or metal strainer (which is usually in two parts)- check this for debris, and remove it and clean it off if this is the source of the problem.

If debris is completely visible in these two places, try removing the drain port cover and thread a slim rod or straightened coat hanger a few inches into the drain, to see if you can remove some built-up grease, food, or other debris.

If the clog has not been found, try checking the draining hose itself.  Remove the bottom panel of the dishwasher to find the drain hose.  If it is folded, has a kink in it or you can see trapped debris in it, do your best to straighten the hose out and untangle it.  If it’s too tangled or has a large clog, you can easily and inexpensively replace this hose.

Remember to rinse food off your dishes before placing them in a dishwasher to keep it from turning into debris that can clog the drain.