How to Unclog a Sink Drain, DIY Plumbing, and Why To Never Use Caustic Soda for Clogged Pipes

Imagine coming home ravenous after a long day, needing to cook supper because there is nothing ready to eat in the house, but the counter is full of dirty dishes and so is the sink, and there is nothing clean with which to cook your dinner, nor a clean surface area on which to work. You resign yourself to washing the dishes (which you know you should have washed earlier) before even starting to make supper, let alone eating it, only…
You start washing the dishes, and the water won’t go down the drain. You clean out the gook from the bottom of the sink, trying to unclog it, but it makes no difference. The sink is hopelessly clogged.

Here’s 2 videos of mike using the snake to attempt to remove the clog via our access port. He first used the snake in the pipe by the sink, sticking it in the pipe in the floor, and pushing it as far as he could. When there was resistance, he’d push it a bit with a little more force until he was able to get it through. Once it was in all the way, he pushed it back and forth like in the video below.

After pushing it back and forth, he twisted the snake around clockwise, to get even more stuff out, and to widen the space he created.

Because we have these access ports in our apartment, we used the snake going from the kitchen sink pipe towards the bathroom port, and then from the bathroom port in the direction of the kitchen. He then did it in the direction from the first bathroom port to the second. That is actually what is shown in the videos.

Once doing that, our sinks were unclogged!

Thats it, right?

Only… Mike thought that putting caustic soda down the drain would be a good idea. Caustic soda is “drain cleaner”, also known as “Drano”, sodium hydroxide, or lye.

After he put in the caustic soda, our sink was once again clogged up, this time real badly.

Why?

I’ll tell you why, I’ll tell you something that my husband didn’t think about before putting the caustic soda down the drain, and what people who recommend using Drano probably don’t know.

Do you know one of the most common and old uses of lye/caustic soda is in soap making?

The way you make soap, in short, is that you mix lye with water, mix that with oil, and mix it up. With enough mixing, it will create a bar of soap.

Well, can you imagine what happened when our drains, filled with kitchen grease, got mixed with lye and water?

That’s right. It made soap.

One huge, thick, goopey, gross “bar of solid soap”, the entire length of our pipe between the kitchen sink and the bathroom.

Stopped up entirely. Nearly as thick as cement.

I apologize in advance for the grossness, but this picture over here is what our pipes were filled with. Packed with it.

Gross kitchen waste “soap”.

Vomitrocious.

In case you don’t believe me that that’s soap, it made suds, and was slippery like soap. It definitely is soap, though not the way I recommend making soap, because I would NEVER wash anything with “soap” that filthy and gross.

Please, please, please, listen to me- never, ever, ever put caustic soda down your kitchen sink drain, or any place else that ever has greasy things poured down it.

If you’re wondering how we got THAT clog out…

We first put a plunger over the drain in our kitchen sink. Because we have two sinks with two drains next to each other, and we wanted to make sure that there actually was some vaccum, and things were being forced down the pipe instead of coming out the sink next to it, Mike and I simultaneously used plungers over both sinks. I’ve since heard that you can just cover one sink with a wet rag, but I haven’t tried that. We pumped and pumped with the plunger, but nothing came out, but it probably did loosen something in there.

I then put in the snake from the bathroom port, in the direction of the kitchen. There was a lot of resistance and I wasn’t able to push it in far. When I removed it, a chunk of the gross soap came out with it. I then put the snake in, pulled it out, and even more soap came with it. I did it again and again and again, pulled out more and more soap, until at one point, all the water that was in the kitchen sink and pipe started flooding out the port in the bathroom- I’d cleared the pipe!
I then widened the opening in the pipe by rotating the snake as in the second movie above. I then used the pipe between the two ports in the bathroom.

Voila.

Our sinks and pipes are no longer clogged.

It was a team effort, it was gross and dirty, but we managed.

And we have the snake for the future, so even though the small investment already paid off, it’ll pay off even more every time we need it from now on.

When you have a clogged drain, what happens to it? Do you deal with it? Your spouse? Your kids? Neighbors? Call a plumber?
Do you own a snake? How long is it? What do you usually do to unclog drains? Do you use Drano? Why or why not?
If you usually do these things yourself, have you ever had a clog so bad that you needed to call the plumber, after trying to fix the problem yourself and having no luck?

See my disclaimer.