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At Benjamin Franklin Plumbing of Fort Worth, our team of expert plumbers carefully considers your Mansfield, TX home’s plumbing when we plan an annual drain cleaning service for you. We know that older homes might require a bit of special care, and you might have fussy drains that you’re not sure about even in a newer home. Your home deserves clean drains that flow smoothly and help prevent backups and other problems during the year. It’s how we take care of every home and its plumbing, ensuring that we provide professional solutions, and leave a clean workspace behind. We know plumbing, and as we clean your drains and connected pipes, we can also provide you with information about the condition of your pipes, any damage or risk of corrosion weakening the pipes in the near future. Our expertise can help you get clean pipes and reduced risk of drain backups, slow drains, and other drain-related issues, but we can also help prevent pipe-related issues that would otherwise cause extensive damage and be costly to recover from.
All the Types of Pipes We See
In our drain cleaning service, we see the variety of material used to plumb homes during the past. They can be cast iron, steel, copper, various plastics, even lead in some cases. Each one has specific characteristics that we check, such as plastics that decay over time, iron pipes that become corroded and tend to acquire material and clog more easily as the interior gets rougher, and copper pipes that may become corroded due to hard water. We also occasionally discover bends in pipes or damage and breakthrough corrosion that can encourage clogs or result in leaks. In addition, while a slight slope to horizontal drain pipes is the standard, occasionally we’ll find plumbing where that was not observed. Without a bit of an incline, wastewater can leave material behind in pipes as it flows, resulting in increased clog occurrence. Our drain cleaning service works to identify issues in your plumbing that may be helpful for you to know so you can have your plumbing updated if you wish.
Ways That Drains Get Narrower and Narrower
Corrosion in drain pipes can reduce the ability of material to flow smoothly through and on to your sewer line. It’s one of a number of ways that your drains can gradually get narrower over time, resulting in reduced drain capacity, more backups, and more clogs as the reduced flow limits the self-cleaning effect that water passing through pipes can have. You see a similar effect in your toilet when you compare a full-tank flush and its effects on your bowl versus a partial-tank flush that barely moves the material and probably leaves some behind. Other problems can occur as materials like hair get hung up in pipes and form filters, capturing other material and building a clog. Flushed objects can have similar effects, constricting flow but not blocking it, so you may not know they’re down there for some time. Expanding material like rice and pasta often constricts P-trap bends if they’re not flushed down with sufficient water, or are present in large quantities. They absorb water like small sponges, gradually filling the pipe and slowing water flow until it stops. This can happen even with materials ground by a garbage disposal. Our drain cleaning service can flush these materials out with pressure. Absorbent materials flushed down the toilet can also expand and block, and they’re even more likely to be trouble as many kinds of personal hygiene products are made of materials that don’t degrade over time, and they tend to be larger, so breaking them up with pressurized water spray is of limited use, and our drain cleaning service in Mansfield, TX has to use other methods.
Watching for Damage and Corrosion
When we’re conducting a drain cleaning service, we often use video inspection to identify the types of materials and clogs in the pipes, the extent of constriction, and the condition of the pipes. We look for damage to the pipes from the inside or outside, areas where the pipe may be weakened, and corrosion that can enhance clogging or risk pipe damage as corrosion weakens the pipe walls, leading to leaks or flooding. We’ll identify issues that we discover so you can schedule repairs or consider pipe replacement, and we also use pipe condition information to plan our drain cleaning service efforts so that we clear the pipes but don’t affect their structure.
Aging Pipes Deserve Special Attention
Typical plumbing in your home has a limited lifetime that may lead to replacement at some time while you own the home. Each material has its own expected service life, and hard water can shorten the life of many pipe materials. Drain cleaning service is an excellent opportunity to examine your pipes and perform a partial plumbing inspection, noting the overall state of your drain pipes and perhaps observing your water supply pipes as well. Issues such as joints between dissimilar metals or poor soldering and other connections that weren’t an issue in the years following an incorrect repair can eventually show as weak points in your plumbing, for example dissimilar metals can lead to accelerated corrosion and decay of the joint between pipes. For an overall plumbing inspection of aging pipes, we’d also recommend checking fixtures and shutoff valves to make sure they’re in good shape and easy to operate, without force that could damage weakened pipe material.
What About Rarely-Used Bathrooms and Other Idle Drains?
If your P-trap dries out, which can happen in as little as a month in dry winter weather, it can allow foul-smelling gas from your plumbing to come up the drain and affect your underused bathroom. There are certain other circumstances where a P-trap can empty, such as absorbent material flushed down a toilet that gets stuck and absorbs the water from the P-trap as it sits in the drain pipe. Rather than chase down issues like these individually once they’re identified, a whole house drain cleaning service makes a sweep through your home’s plumbing, which resolves many minor issues. In the case of dry P-traps, there may be dried material that gets cleared out, and we’ll probably recommend that you run water down unused drains such as in the guest bathroom on a periodic basis to keep them closed against gas releases.
Checking Your Plumbing Vent
Another source of sewer gas problems is a blocked plumbing vent, which in addition to venting sewer gas from your drain system provides air intake that allows drains to empty. It’s a possible alternative to clog busting on an emergency plumber call, something professionals know to look for when toilets won’t flush and sinks gurgle as they try to empty. If we suspect during a drain cleaning service that there are plumbing vent issues, you can schedule related repairs to ensure that your drains function properly, as they could be impaired even if they’re perfectly clean, and to reduce the risk of sewer gas entering your living space.
Drains Connect to Other Lines and Down They Go
The big picture of our drain cleaning service in Mansfield, TX is a complex hierarchy of drains, traps, local piping, and wastewater piping that transits between floors, all leading down to the sewer line entrance in the basement. By cleaning your drain system, we remove obstructions and clear the way for wastewater flow throughout the system, preventing clogs deep in your pipes from leading to complex emergency plumber visits as they attempt to determine whether the blockage is in the drain, P-trap, local pipe, expressway between floors, or further down, or whether a plumbing vent problem is involved. Once you’ve had the reset of a drain cleaning service, diagnosis of drain issues becomes a lot simpler. If your drains have been backing up in tandem, or one into another on the same floor, and other puzzling multi-drain issues, chances are there’s a clog down the line that they combine into, causing interesting dynamics and a lot of frustration.
Checking Cleanouts and Traps
There are usually removable cleanouts in key locations throughout your home, especially in P-traps and at the entrance to your main sewer line. It’s important that these be accessible and easy to remove for future cleaning and clog removal, or in the case of some drains, sometimes jewelry retrieval. When issues like expanding materials clogging the P-trap occur, they provide an alternative way to clearing the way, removing material through the cleanout instead of pushing it further down the line after the clog is broken up. Our drain cleaning service has extensive experience with finding the best way to address individual clogs as well as clearing your drain system.
Snaking, Augers, and Other Mechanical Tools
Video inspection or information about a clog source can help us choose the right tool for the job. Breaking up a grease-based clog, a hair clog, or an object stuck in the pipe requires different strategies, depending on whether the material can be broken up and allowed to pass down the pipe without causing problems further on. It may be necessary to grab the clog, such as a wad of hair, and pull it back out instead of pushing it further on, and in the case of an object such as a plastic toy, removal is usually the best option. Breaking through a clog or object can get the water flowing, but without removing the material in some way, it’s going to reoccur sooner or later, leading to repeat plumbing visits for stuck drains and overflows. A thorough drain cleaning service can help prevent these issues.
Hydro Jet Sweeps Them Clean, If They’re Up For It
A wonderful modern technology for cleaning pipes is hydro jetting, where water sprayed at thousands of pounds per square inch (PSI) busts up clogs, breaks apart grease accumulation, and power washes the walls of your pipes, leaving them easy exits for your future flushes and drain emptying. Hydro jetting works well in sewer lines too, where clogs can grow large and require significant force to break them up and send them on down the line to the city sewer. In some cases, a serious sewer backup situation can be resolved by well-applied hydro jet cleanup, and video inspection can confirm if that was the only sewer issue present. In your home’s pipes, this wonderful technology is used by our drain cleaning service with a measure of caution, since high pressure can damage weakened pipes. Video inspection and an expert plumber’s in Mansfield, TX knowledge of pipe materials and condition can help us determine whether this is a good solution for cleaning all or part of your drain system.
It All Comes Down to Your Sewer Line
The condition of your sewer always has an effect on the performance of your drains, since any blockage there will cascade up the drain system, limiting flow downwards and into the sewer. If our drain cleaning service identifies your sewer as a factor in drain issues, it’s important to talk about ways to resolve your sewer issues in addition to clearing your drains for your safety and comfort.
Taking a Look Along the Way
Video inspection is an important tool in most aspects of plumbing, and a great way to ensure that we’re making the right drain cleaning efforts through your pipes, recognizing issues and switching to the right tool without guesswork. Our plumbers use similar techniques when we respond to emergency plumber calls which helps us avoid, for example, using a plunger that only pushes objects deeper.
Benjamin Franklin Plumbing of Fort Worth and Our Professional Drain Cleaning Service
Our plumbers take good care of our customers in Mansfield, TX with expert drain cleaning service and other plumbing services, delivered with careful attention to the specific plumbing details of the home we’re serving. Give us a call to have our team perform a drain cleaning service for your Mansfield, TX home.