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Look at this, Richard. Literally everything but the kitchen sink, actually, just about. So I thought we would take a minute and go over all the ways you can get a stoppage, and then clear them. The most common, quite often, is the toilet stoppage. It usually happens when people are overusing or when kids are involved. It's a big deal, so I thought it would make sense to start by seeing what happens inside a toilet bowl. This is the water line right here, and you see water right here, but people don't realize there's a passageway that comes up here, goes up this little short leg, and then down through this really convoluted path. You notice it gets slightly smaller as you go down here. So if there were solid waste and paper jammed in right here and you tried to take a plunger and just push, you could actually work against yourself and compress it. The tip I want to give on a plunger is to get it seated right here, push down a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, just to get a seal, and then pull it back the other way. Now you're going to draw that stoppage up a little bit to break it up, and then it should get clear. Not always, though. No, they make a tool expressly for clearing these things. If you took a regular wire and just tried to clear this, you would scrape the china. So this is called a closet auger. If you see right here, there's a protective coating on this arm. What you do is advance this gently up through it. It'll pass through here, clearing any stoppage. The action would be like this, and somewhere inside the guts, that wire, you just push it. Yeah, push it, push it. Okay, it has a hook on it, so it's sort of like fishing. Kev, I'm not your kind of fishing rod. Oh, I got one. I know you're a plumber, I get it. That's right.
All right, so on a lavatory we can start the attack with a plunger. But there's one important callout: if you look right here on any lavatory, that's legal, it's supposed to have a thing called an overflow right here. It might be at the front, it might be at the back, like this. But what happens is if we put a plunger on it and there's a stoppage below it, every bit of the force you apply here could come right out at you. So it's really important to block this off, so that all that hydraulic force goes down and not out at you. Typically, when we're getting these clogs, they're in the trap. Quite often, here's the typical cross section underneath the sink. You've got a pop-up assembly. In a lavatory you've got this linkage right here. This is a place where hair will often clog. Oftentimes you can take apart the trap and dump it out and see what's going on, but many times you've got to come down. You pull this out, and you're going to come down with a wire. Right, so similar to your closet auger over there, this is going to push it, drive it down, and you advance it gently. There's an advance right here, so you do a little, then you lock it, and you keep advancing, driving it down through. But you're not done yet. Just imagine this trap is right here, so you get down through the pop-up assembly, down through the trap, and you come to here. Now, in a lavatory it might be just a short line right here, and the wire has a choice to go. You hope it goes down where the stoppage might be, because that's where the liquid is going. Correct. But if it's plumbed properly, there's a line that goes up and ultimately out through the roof. That's the vent. You hope that by gravity the tip of the wire would go this way. If it doesn't, you just keep doing it and doing it, or you bend the wire, and sometimes you have to cut it and put a cleanout in. Okay. Similar on a disposer. So with this, you have to take this apart and find a way to get the wire down in here. Gotcha. I do want to call out one thing on a lavatory, though. You think it was hard to get the wire to go this way? I showed you this because this is how... what is this? Well, there are bathrooms that have two lavatories, and this might be the way the plumber roughed it in. Okay, so you cut down through here with the wire. Where does it go? Over here, and it comes waving to you out the other sink, when it really wants to go in here. So if the original plumber cared at all about us, they would have done this so the wire would have no choice but to go here. This is actually not legal in many jurisdictions. It's literally just a highway for the wire. Now, it will put it going in the right direction. That's right, so it won't go up the vent. Okay, all right. That's lavatories.
This is also the drain. In a bathtub, you can use a plunger, but the same rules apply that applied at the lavatory, because this is an overflow right here. If you did this, you'd have to pull this plate off and block this off. Let me hold it up. This is the bottom of the tub, and this is the part you'd see in the tub right here. Valves up here, and here's the mechanism to do it. You take that off, and if you do this, you've got to block the overflow, and then the force of the plunger would push this way. Okay. But people make the mistake of taking the wire and going in here. Yep, it's no different. It could come back waving at you again. I don't understand how you even made it through a career in plumbing. It must have driven you absolutely crazy. So you really want to come down this way. Oh, so don't go through the... no, you don't go through that. You come down through here, then gently advance, gently advance, tighten this up, and come down, right through the trap, and then you'll clear it. Because again, I think it's important for people to realize that the clog is typically not here. It's going to be in the trap, oftentimes, which is always down here. There can be hair in the mechanism, so that could be here. Is that from a personal connection? I just brought it from home, set the person... well, actually, I don't have any money. All right, so that's an important tip: come down this way. And this is all the stuff that's going to be up at the fixture, where the trap is. Yeah, but sooner or later it goes down to the basement or down below into a larger pipe. At this point you may have to step up from a little wire like this to a bigger power wire. At every change of direction, every time water comes down and turns, by code it's supposed to have a cleanout. Okay, so this cleanout becomes a place a wire could go in. I want to make this point: if you run a wire in there, you really want to find a way to run that wire and also run water down the drain. If you looked inside a long kitchen sink drain, you'd probably see the bottom quarter or third just filled with solid waste. So if you just ran a wire in there a little bit, it wouldn't necessarily flush or clean it. You really have to find a way to run the wire, bang it around inside, disturb it, loosen it, and let the water run throughout the whole thing. Okay, that's really important. Then I want to call out something pretty interesting, isn't it? A water hammer. Well, no, it looks like it. You've been paying attention. What is this thing? This uses the power of hydraulic force. With this coming through our cleanout, you take this off, connect this to a hose, and put it down inside here as far as you want it to go. Say you want to get down to this point. We're driving it downstream. This is specifically made for clearing clogs. Absolutely. So now what it's going to do is fill up. The water is going to pressurize this and make it fill. You can't fit that one; it's going to fill up that void. Yeah, but look what's at the end: a little hole. Wow. So that would pressurize and seal off right here. No water's coming out. It wouldn't come this way, and now this small hole would pressurize and force water down to where the clog is. This actually has some advantages for getting into places. I will caution you, if you've got ancient galvanized piping, you're now putting pressure where there hasn't been any pressure for a long time, so you could expose a leak. But it's a way to easily push that clog downstream. That's unbelievable. There are a lot of places where you can go wrong. Yeah, but there are a lot of solutions. That's right. What most people want to do is put some chemical down there. I want to put a caution out: if you have a real stoppage, this chemical is not going to make a difference. It's only going to add danger for the people who have to come along afterward. What do you think? Never use it? If you have, maybe on an ongoing basis, to deal with organic matter that might be there, but nothing beats the mechanical solution: clean the wire, flush it, and keep that pipe clean. Also, if left in there, I've seen it sit in a long horizontal old pipe and eat away at the bottom of that pipe. Yeah, and most importantly, you can't go fishing with that. You can't. Okay, all right, that covers it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for watching. This Old House has a video for just about every home improvement project, so be sure to check out the others, and if you like what you see, click the subscribe button so you get our newest videos right in your feed.