Thanksgiving is here! A great holiday filled with food, family, and fellowship but a lot of preparation work goes into a great Thanksgiving celebration every year. The warmth of good food, a clean home, and welcome warmth from the cold outside all work in concert for an amazing occasion. Unfortunately, the dread of an oncoming disaster can add unneeded stress to an otherwise great celebration.
Holiday problems aren’t always nice enough to wait until after your guests have had their fill and gone home. Problems may strike both before and during your party. While you can’t prepare yourself for all of them, there are a few really simple things you can do to ensure that your party is ready to deal with major issues before they arrive.
Proper Plumbing Care and Maintenance
It never fails; every year at Thanksgiving Boulden Brothers gets an astounding number of service calls for clogged drains. It’s usually not for the reasons you might think. Clogged toilets area common occurrence, but not by any more of a margin than normal. For one thing, they’re easy to prevent. Many of the problems we see with toilets every year are due to improper use of low-flow toilets. You should never flush anything other than human waste or toilet paper. Other items, even wet-wipes labeled “flushable” have a high chance of clogging your drains. If you want to prevent a disaster scenario before it ever starts, be careful of what gets flushed.
But caution shouldn’t end there. You see, the largest number of calls we receive around Thanksgiving aren’t for clogged toilets or sewer lines, they’re for clogged sinks. In the couple of days leading up to and through Thanksgiving, the call volume we receive for help with clogged drains is higher than at any other point in the year. Bad drain habits are to blame for this.
People, especially those with a garbage disposal, tend to treat their kitchen sinks as a waste basket for cleaning up kitchen scraps. But this mistreatment leaves many of them with clogged or smelly drains, usually just in time to be a problem.
- Never pour fats, cooking oil, or excess grease down your drain. They’re liquids while cooking but they congeal and solidify in your pipes quickly.
- Fibrous and starchy foods, such as peels or turkey skins, can hang or collect inside your drains in much the same way that hair does in any other drain. Stringy items like these should be thrown away with regular trash or composted outdoors.
- Make sure that your disposal, if you’re using one, is running before you start pushing non-fatty or stringy food down into it. Filling it full and then turning it on is a great way to break your disposal before Thanksgiving even starts.
What to Do for Clogged Thanksgiving Drains
Do not fix a clogged sink drain, especially one with a disposal, using liquid decloggers or solvents. While these work for hair traps and some other issues, they are not rated for foods and oils which have been flushed down the sink. To solve these clogs, use a plumbing snake to clear the clog. If You’re unfamiliar with how to use a snake, or you don’t own one and simply want a fast-fix before the party starts, call your friends at Boulden Brothers. We do answer many of these calls and we’ll get your drain flowing freely in no time at all.
Happy Thanksgiving from Boulden Brothers!
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