Tag: Drain cleaning flotation

Clogged pipes are a no-go when you have a house full of guests ready to eat or shower. Having to call a plumber in the middle of your party or gathering can be embarrassing and put a damper on your festivities. Instead of letting your guests undergo second-hand sheepishness, avoid the clogs altogether and follow these tips.

5 Tips to Warn Off Clogged Pipes

Two of the biggest reasons why pipes become blocked off are because of waste and overuse. Here are a few simple ways to prevent these risks.

1. Spread Out Showers and Laundry Loads

If you’re having guests over long enough that they’ll need showers and laundry done, then spread these events out as much as possible. Try not to have too many people shower one after another. If possible, clear the shower drain between each person. Similarly, try to complete laundry loads throughout the day instead of overloading your drains all at once.

2. Dispose of Fats, Oils, and Grease Properly

If you’ve read our post on holiday plumbing tips, you’ll know that the best way to avoid clogged pipes is to store fats, oils, and grease in jars. But what do you do after that? The next step is to store your jars in the refrigerator to let these fats cool and solidify (if you’re able to store them alongside your leftovers). Afterwards, place these jars in the garbage can. But be sure to keep them upright to avoid spillage.

3. Clean Your Plates for the Dishwasher

Before placing your plates in the dishwasher, be sure to scrape all the leftover food and sauce off. Either throw the food waste in the garbage or in your compost bin. This prevents your pipes from being clogged with leftover food and allows your dishwasher to do a better job of cleaning. The same goes for your pots and pans. If you’re having trouble scraping the food off, be sure to soak them beforehand to loosen up any food.

4. Avoid Corrosive Drain Cleaners

Plenty of drain cleaners use corrosive materials that can eat through your pipes. While they might temporarily clear a block in the short run, they cause damage in the long run. This damage can prove expensive, especially if you have to replace pipes. Your best option is to call a plumber that can clear any clogs or blockages without degrading the material.

5. Leave Tough and Fibrous Foods Out of Your Disposal

Your garbage disposal cannot handle fruit pits, coffee grounds, bones, potato peels, pasta, or any manner of tough foods. While it can handle the soft parts of fruits and veggies, avoid adding any particularly fibrous foods like celery.

If clogged pipes become an issue, call Custom Plumbing of Arizona at 602-883-2761. Depending on how blocked your pipes are, a drain snake might not be enough to clear them. Hydro-jetting is another service we offer to get rid of particularly tough blockages. For more information on how we unblock pipes, click here.

Does drain cleaner work? Clogged drains are not only a headache, but they can lead to other issues in your pipes as well. In these situations, most people will try to DIY their plumbing before they call an expert in. That usually means they scramble for the store-bought drain cleaner and hope for the best. But does drain cleaner work? The answer is often no—so let’s take a look at why.

What Types of Ingredients are in Your Drain Cleaner?

Drain cleaners are either chemical-based or enzyme-based. Both formulas work to digest or burn through the obstructions blocking your pipe.

Chemical-based cleaners tend to use acids, oxidizers, or caustics. This includes ingredients like sulfuric acid, sodium hypochlorite, lye, or caustic soda. While these solutions create lots of heat to burn through blockages, they can damage your pipes if you use them too much and too often.

Enzyme-based cleaners contain bacteria that produce enzymes when they meet organic matter, like food, hair, or mold. Enzymes help break all of that gunk down into bits and pieces that are easy to flush away with water. These cleaners tend to be much easier on the environment and on your home pipes.

Long-Term Damage from Drain Cleaners

Chemical-based drain cleaners might work in the short run, but they cause damage to your drains (and even your health).

1. Leaks

Caustic chemicals, such as lye, can create cracks in your pipes, sinks, and toilets. These newly formed cracks and crevices can cause leaks that are expensive to repair. Furthermore, cracks in your toilet are hard to repair—and will likely need to be replaced.

2. Burst Pipes

Pipes are vulnerable to the corrosive ingredients in many drain cleaners. This is especially true if you live in a home with older pipes. Corrosion can lead to burst pipes, which usually causes disastrous flooding.

3. Unsafe for Skin and Clothes

Drain cleaner liquids can burn or irritate your skin, eyes, and lungs. Mixing drain cleaners with other cleaning products can be especially dangerous.

Additionally, avoid using these solutions in standing bodies of water, such as in clogged toilets. They can splash on your skin or clothes. Keep in mind that even professional plumbers use extreme caution with these chemical-based solutions.

Does Drain Cleaner Work Well?

Slimy to the touch, biofilm is a thin film of bacteria that lines your pipes. It’s the sludge that holds clogs together in your drains. A drain cleaner can potentially break down the solid chunks of organic matter within the biofilm and unblock your pipes. However, a liquid drain cleaner can never coat the entire drain or pipe. There will likely still be organic matter where a drain cleaner can’t reach it.

That’s why you need a plumbing expert to unclog your drain instead.

Say No to Chemical Drain Cleaners

Does drain cleaner work? In some instances, this solution does work—but it often damages your pipes or leaves the entire problem unsolved. For a more permanent solution that won’t corrode your pipes, call us at 602-883-2761. We’ll send a plumbing specialist to your house for a safe, cost-effective solution.

We use the term flotation for the cleavage of solid microparticles with different wettability. These are water-immiscible (hydrophobic) particles, and wettable (hydrophilic) particles. Air bubbles or oil droplets rise up to the interface, carrying these hydrophobic particles. Plumbers use the method of flotation in sewage treatment from suspended solids and various organic substances, with the separation of substances in such industries as food, oil refining, and others.

Froth Flotation

The method of froth flotation expands. Initially, you would treat the particles with reagents. Then air bubbles push them onto the surface of the water, and form a layer of foam. For its stability, you add foaming agents. The mixture obtains the foam by bubbling with stirring the liquid medium (pulp) or without stirring.

The essence of flotation: in the water, the air bubble approaches a hydrophobic particle, the interlayer of water that separates them decreases and at the critical moment it breaks, full wetting occurs, and the bubble densely adheres to the particle. The density of the bubble, with the particle, is smaller than the density of the pulp, and they rise to the interface, forming a foam, which you then mechanically remove from the flotation. These factors affect the stability of the bubble-particle pair:

• dimensions of both the bubble and the particles.
• physicochemical properties of the liquid medium, particles, and bubbles.
• other factors.

Drain Cleaning by Flotation

Consider the process of drain cleaning treatment by flotation. In a flotation unit, a jet of water and a stream of air go in one direction. They scatter the particles of pollution throughout the volume of water and when moving together with air they stick together with bubbles. For optimal operation, bubbles are passed into the flotation chamber with no more than the size determined by the experiments. Since, with a large size of the bubbles, the airflow velocities and the flux of contaminated particles are different, and the particles do not have time to attach to the bubble. This happens while they mix the water, which entails the rupture of the already connected pairs of a bubble-particle.

Pressure vs. Impeller Rotation

There are pressure, impeller, and flotation using porous materials. In pressure flotation, air under pressure saturates the water. If you do not add the reagents, then you would refer to such flotation as physical purification methods. Pressure flotation allows you to regulate the amount of dissolved air and the size of the bubbles.

Impeller flotation is used to purify water in the oil refining industry. This method is not very efficient due to the large turbulence of the flows in the flotator, which destroys the flocculent particles. For the best result, add surfactants. Porous materials allow to obtain air bubbles of small dimensions, for this purpose, the rate of air flow from the material hole should be minimal.

The effectiveness of flotation increases the use of coagulants, which help to remove impurities in the form of persistent emulsion compounds. After flotation, the products go to further dehydration into settling tanks-thickeners and hydrocyclones, dryers and so on.