Pro-Tips: How to Unclog a Standard Bath Sink Drain

How to Unclog:

Video Transcript: Austin Taylor here with Dynamic Drains Plumbing and Drain Experts, where the best customer is the educated one. A lot of people are having to stay at home right now due to social distancing which means they are probably noticing things around the house that need to get taken care of. One of them may be a clogged-up bathroom sink, so I wanted to show today how to easily unclog a bathroom sink drain if the clog happens to be right there right below the sink.

So I got my sink drain here and what I’m going to show you, the first thing is that on a lot of these, and this isn’t universal so don’t assume that yours is like this, but on a lot of these this component right here actually unscrews right off making it very easy to use tools such as this, a drain stick, to get down into there. Twist it and remove whatever hair or other debris might be in there.

Demonstration:

Now if you have a foreign object that’s fallen down in there it may take some pliers or a tool to get it in. But let’s say that you don’t have the advantage of that type of a stopper that can be unscrewed off of there, you may have to remove the whole stopper, and a lot of times these stoppers are actually locked into place.

So, I have a pop-up assembly which is what this whole assembly is called here uninstalled to make it much easier on demonstrating this. I’m also going to remove this component here, the pop-up rod and this clevis hanger which is the proper way to install it. I’ll remove these off of here to make it a lot easier so I can show all this.

Let’s say your stopper is locked into place, you have this pivot rod right here that actually connects into the bottom of this. So this is going to be facing like so, put a bucket underneath this whole assembly to catch any potential components that may fall.

What you’re going to do is have this towards the back, this is pointed down so the poppers are in the up position. If you have long enough arms to reach around, grab this and you should be able to unscrew this retainer nut by hand, remove the rod, you can remove the stopper and that would allow you to use your drain stick to get down into there to clean whatever debris may be in there out of there.

Well, the reason I said put a bucket down below is that you have two things on here that can easily fall and cause or easily fall off. They are the washers that go on either side of this little ball right here. You got a washer right here, another one right there. Those have a dual purpose. They are spacers to keep the rod from pushing too far back into the pop-up, plus they also seal it to keep water from leaking as water flows down here.

Reassembly:

So let’s say you clean this out and you’ve run the water, obviously test it to make sure it works. You’re going to want to put the stopper back in so make sure it’s facing away from you, put the rod pointed down, put the stopper in the closed position and it takes a little bit of fooling around to make sure you get it. Make sure it works like you’re wanting it to and then thread the retainer nut back on and make sure it all works. Run water, test for leaks, all that kind of good stuff. If you’ve done that and you’re good to go, no more clogs, awesome. If it doesn’t work you may need to do more work, you may need to pull the p-trap apart and more work may be necessary.

If that’s the case, don’t hesitate to call us or if you have any leaks left over please give us a call, we can help you out with that.

Hope that helps, hope everyone stays safe thank you very much for watching. Austin Taylor, Dynamic Drains Plumbing and Drain Experts.


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