FAQ

About $227 across LA County, over a range of $110 to $345 — and that number is close to useless, which is worth saying rather than pretending otherwise. It is the mean of at least five different jobs that share one sentence. A trap is $0 if you own a hand snake, or about $110 if you do not. A branch line is $110 to $250. A main line is $200 to $450. Roots are $350 to $800 to jet properly, with a repair behind them. A structural fault — a belly, a crack, a collapse — is four figures and is not a cleaning at all. An average across those five tells you nothing about which one you have, and which one you have is the entire question.

What actually moves the number, rather than the average: WHICH FIXTURE and HOW FAR IN. A trap is minutes and needs no machine. A branch needs a small machine and half an hour. A main line needs a bigger machine, an accessible cleanout and often an hour. Beyond that you are no longer buying cleaning — roots and structural faults are recurring or permanent problems, and they price accordingly. Two things that do NOT move it much: how long the job takes, since most are between thirty and ninety minutes whatever they cost, and how dramatic it looks. Access moves it far more than either.

You can work out your own band before you call anybody, and it takes two minutes. Run a different fixture from the blocked one and watch. One drain slow while the rest of the house behaves normally is a trap or a branch: $0 to $250. Several fixtures slow at once, or anything backing up at the lowest point in the house, is a main line: $200 to $450, and stop using water. A drain that clears and then comes back on a seasonal rhythm is roots: $350 to $800 to jet, and it buys an interval rather than a fix. Knowing which of those you have before a quote is given is the whole defense against a price revised on the doorstep.

$75 to $175 professionally, which is the bottom of the five bands — and it is the drain most worth trying yourself first. A hand snake costs about twenty dollars, reaches exactly where the problem usually is, and hair bound with soap in or just past the trap is what it usually is. The one thing that changes the price completely: if the shower holds water while the washing machine or another fixture drains, it is not a shower job at all. The shower is simply the lowest fixture in the house and the main line is reporting through it, which is a $200 to $450 job.

Fill the base a couple of inches and watch it. Water that sits with no movement at all is a full blockage. Water that crawls away is a partial one, and a partial one becomes a full one — usually at the least convenient moment, because that is when the most water is going through it. Water that drains normally but smells is not a blockage and clearing it will achieve nothing: that is a dry or damaged trap letting drain air back into the room, and it wants refilling or replacing. And water that only backs up when something else in the house is running is the main line, not the shower.

In this order. Lift the strainer and clear what you can reach by hand or with a bent wire, which deals with a surprising proportion. Then a plunger with the overflow blocked off — the step most people skip, and the reason plunging often seems not to work. Then a hand snake fed past the trap, which costs about twenty dollars. If the snake feeds through freely and nothing changes, stop: the blockage is past the trap and into the branch, and that is a machine rather than a tool. Feeding more cable into a line you cannot see is how a $110 job becomes a repair.

Most drain jobs are between thirty and ninety minutes, and that is true across almost the whole price range — which is the useful part of the answer. A $110 branch clearing and a $400 main line clearing take about the same time. So if a price is being justified to you by how long it will take, that is not what you are paying for. You are paying for which machine, how far in, and how accessible the cleanout is. The jobs that genuinely take longer are the ones that turn out not to be cleanings at all.

On a grease blockage in a metal pipe, hot water genuinely helps, and it is worth two attempts before anything else. It softens the fat coating rather than dissolving it, so it works best combined with running water and dish soap and repeated rather than done once. Two cautions. Boiling water into a plastic waste line can soften or distort the joints — hot from the faucet is the right temperature for modern pipework, not off the stove. And on anything that is not grease it does nothing at all: hair, roots, a foreign object and a collapsed section are not temperature problems, and pouring water onto a full blockage just gives you a sink full of hot water.