On May 3, 6:36*pm, Nate Nagel wrote:
subject says all... *this AM I was taking a shower and felt that lovely
feeling of water backing up in the bathtub and bathing my feet in cool
soapiness. *Got home today to find that there was STILL water in the
tub, so it was stopped up but good. *I'm usually pretty good about
keeping the drain clear of hair etc. but the girl is half Japanese and
has about the hair you'd expect :/

I bailed most of the water into the sink with a bucket, then poured some
drain cleaner crystals into the drain, let it sit a while, and went at
it with a plunger. *Obviously this was only of limited effectiveness as
the overflow is not sealed off. *I didn't see any way to get a snake
down the pipe because the drain looks like a laundry sink drain in that
there's a cross pattern thing in it, with the tapped hole in the middle
to hold the pop-up piece (to make matters worse, I know that it's well
stuck, but removing it wouldn't have been a good option what with the
drain being stopped up and all.)

Fortunately, after a few minutes doing what I could with the plunger,
that moved things around enough to let it drain again, so I boiled a
couple pots full of water and threw them down the drain to hopefully
wash out all the nastiness. *My question is, if that *hadn't* worked,
what should I have done? *Only thing I could think of to do would be to
go to the store and buy a cleanout for the drain pipe (if there even is
such a thing for a non-stack-sized pipe) and go in through the access
panel in the bedroom and install the cleanout on the overflow pipe to
provide a place to insert the snake. *Am I missing something or would
this be the way to do it? *I forsee that as long as I have a Person of
Hair in the house that this won't be the last time this happens.

Clearly the blockage was at or near the bathtub, just too far down for
me to reach with the little plastic hair removing thing that I use every
now and then, as it shares a stack with the sink, the kitchen sink, and
dishwasher and all of those still work fine

On the upside, while the tub backed up with no warning (we don't
typically take baths, so there was no opportunity to notice the drain
running slow - it either drains faster than the water comes out of the
shower head, or it doesn't) I had noticed a bit of a funky smell in the
bathroom the past few days and hopefully it was whatever muck was
building up in the drain that was the cause of that piquant aroma.
(please, please let it be so. *I don't need any more issues.)

nate

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Circle the calendar every 6 months to do a Drano dump down the tub
drain. A good defense is better than a poor offense.