Shower Drain Cleaning in Cerritos

Very often, and it would be dishonest not to say so. Lift the strainer, clear what you can reach, then a plunger with the overflow blocked, then a hand snake past the trap. That sequence costs about twenty dollars and solves most blocked showers. Call somebody when the snake feeds through freely and nothing changes.

No, and clearing it will not help. A trap holds a plug of water that keeps drain air out of the room. If a shower is used rarely the water evaporates and the smell comes back up — running it for a minute refills it. If it smells despite regular use, the trap is damaged or was never right.

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.

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.