While there are plenty of jobs, you need to call an expert plumber for, there are some basic plumbing tips that every homeowner needs to know about. The tips on our list are here to prevent you from creating costly issues that require extensive repair.
6 Plumbing Tips for Every Home
- No grease down the drain
- Use a basket strainer
- Clean soap scum
- Flush only toilet paper
- Don’t poke holes in your pipes
- Take care of leaks as soon as you find them
- No Grease Down the Drain
While many liquids are safe to pour down the drain, grease and oil aren’t. They’re piping hot liquids once you finish cooking bacon or draining ground beef—but they solidify at room temperatures. Once they congeal or become solid, they create pipe blockages. Grease will coat your pipes and gradually build up. You probably won’t notice it at first. Slowly but surely, however, oil and grease clogs your drains.
- Use a Basket Strainer
Have you ever pulled out a tangled, greasy mess of hair and soap from your shower drain? (If you haven’t, consider yourself lucky.) If you use traditional bar soap, this soap actually tends to solidify more often inside of pipes, unlike liquid soap. In the kitchen, your drain might be catching all of the food waste coming off of plates, pots, pans, and the like.
A quick way to prevent this is to simply use a basket strainer in all of your drains to catch any particles of hair, soap, or food that might escape inside.
- Clean Soap Scum
Another thing to remember is that actual chunks of soap certainly create clogs, but so can soap scum. Soap scum is the residue left behind when soap mixes with water; it’s made up of minerals and other fatty acids. If you neglect your drains, scum can build up along your pipes and create blockages. An easy solution is to pour boiling hot water down your drains every so often.
- Flush Only Toilet Paper
Besides the obvious bodily waste that must go down the toilet, be sure to flush only toilet paper. Wet wipes—even the ones that say “flushable”—still clog your pipes over time. So do sanitary pads, diapers, cotton balls, medicine, and all other animate and inanimate objects.
Similarly, if you use lots of toilet paper, try to cut down (or buy a bidet).
- Don’t Poke Holes in Your Pipes
While you’re probably not fiending to puncture your pipes on purpose (we hope), it’s easy to accidentally create leaks when you’re tearing down walls or otherwise undergoing construction. Before drilling holes or hammering nails into your walls, be sure to locate any plumbing and exercise caution where there is.
- Take Care of Leaks as Soon as You Find Them
Leaks can not only be annoying to listen to, but they can also cost you lots of money in the long run. A small drip every now and again doesn’t seem like it would cost you much, but leaky faucets can waste up to eight gallons of water a day. Leaky toilets are even worse—they can waste up to 200 gallons of water a day. Furthermore, they can cause plenty of structural damage that becomes even more expensive.
Staying proactive with these plumbing tips is a no-brainer. With a little bit of effort now, you can possibly prevent tons of damage later.
For more complicated plumbing issues, call Custom Plumbing of Arizona at 602-883-2761 today. We’ll come out to your house for a free estimate!