Have a Pro Clear Clogs with a Drain Snake

Can you buy a hand-operated drain snake and try to clear a clogged pipe yourself? Definitely, yes. Will it work? Depends. If not, after the expense, wasted effort and mess you’ll still end up calling a professional plumber to rescue the situation. If the clog is as simple as a ball of hair and soap residue conveniently located in the trap directly under the sink, you can probably utilize DIY methods to clear it out. Here are some other common scenarios, however, where the expertise of a qualified plumber with professional equipment are definitely called for:

• Deep clogs. Many clogs aren’t located within the limited reach of a typical manual hand snake. A plumber comes to the job equipped with a powered drain snake 100 feet long to clear clogs that often occur much deeper in the household plumbing system.
• Rental equipment may be damaging. Renting professional motorized drain snakes with heavy duty metal cable poses a risk to home plumbing. In the hands of a DIY-er, these units are powerful and large enough to fracture typically fragile residential pipes. Once a drain pipe deep in the system is broken due to unskilled attempts to clear a clog, the expense of repair spirals far above what it would have cost for an experienced plumber to handle the simple job in the first place.
• Sludge accumulation. Simply poking a hole in a clog in a sludge-filled pipe using a small snake is only a very temporary solution. The gooey sludge accumulation soon closes the opening and the clog recurs. A professional plumber utilizes drain snakes with rotating cutting blades sized to the diameter of the drain pipe. This equipment not only destroys the clog itself, the blades scour the internal surfaces of the pipe to clean out sludge and prevent recurrent clogging.

At Sobieski Services, Inc., our goal is to help our customers in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey learn more about energy and home comfort issues — especially HVAC and plumbing issues —so that they can save money and live in healthier, more comfortable homes.