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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