Drain cleaning can be a bit of a pain, to put it mildly. Most people don’t think about it until they need it and then forget about it until they need it again. This is understandable: the symptoms of a clogged drain don’t show up until it’s already too late, and you need professional help.

Of course, professional help is useful no matter the circumstance when it comes to cleaning a drain. But table that for a moment. What makes drain cleaning so complicated and difficult?

The answer is that there are so many different sources of drain problems. Both soap and grease provide the biggest problems for household drains: soap residue builds up on the inside of the drain, and grease creates coatings within the drain itself. Both can slow down the drain, and both have sufficiently different chemical compositions that many household cleaning agents can only tackle one or the other.

Foodstuffs are also a large problem. Toilet drains can be clogged by apple cores or scraps carelessly thrown into the bottom. Not everything will dissolve in water, even given hours or days, and these alone can create drain clogs; at the very least, they’ll create a slower drain.

Drain problems can also be complicated by the season. In winter, plumbing companies in Edmonton know better than to use harsher cleaning agents that could contribute to pipe rusting, freezing, and/or bursting. In fact, the winter cold puts drains, being metal interior fixtures, at much greater risk in general.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so watch what you’re putting down a drain before you put it there. Older bathroom sink drains with narrower sink stoppers, for example, are not really useful for washing hair, which should be restricted to the shower or kitchen sink in older homes. Food items do not go down any sort of drain, except perhaps for mostly-liquid items like sauces.

Even then, though, everything from sauce to grease to the soap you need to clean your dishes can cause problems for a drain over a long period of time. With this in mind, it’s worth keeping in touch with your local Edmonton drain cleaners such as Capital Plumbing & Heating Ltd., even if it’s just to get a checkup every once in a while. Let things get too bad, and it’ll be too late.