Blocked drains are one of the most common plumbing problems in Bournemouth homes, and almost every one of them is caused by things that could have been kept out of the pipe in the first place. The good news is that most blockages are preventable once you know what causes them. The less good news is that by the time you notice a problem, the blockage is usually well established and needs professional attention rather than a supermarket bottle of drain unblocker.
The most common cause of a kitchen blockage is fat, oil and grease. It goes down the sink warm and liquid, cools inside the pipe, and sticks to the walls of the drain. Over months and years, layers build up until the internal diameter of the pipe is a fraction of what it should be, and the first time some vegetable peel or a scrap of food catches on the layer, the sink stops draining. The fix is not to pour fat down the sink in the first place. Pour cooking oil into a jar, let it set, and put it in the bin. Wipe frying pans with kitchen roll before washing them.
Bathroom drains block for a different reason: hair and soap. Hair catches on the crosshairs of a plughole and on any rough surface further down the pipe, and soap – especially traditional bar soap with any tallow content – binds to the hair and becomes a solid mass. A simple hair-catcher over the plughole solves ninety per cent of it. When the drain does start to slow, pulling out the visible hair with a wire hook before it works its way further down the pipe is worth ten minutes of anyone’s time.
Toilets block for yet another reason, and it is almost always something being flushed that should not be. Wet wipes are the biggest single cause. Even ones labelled flushable do not break down in the way toilet paper does; they travel a few metres down the pipe, snag on a joint, and gather more wipes and other debris around them until the flow stops. Kitchen roll, sanitary products, cotton buds, dental floss – all of it belongs in a bin, not a toilet. A toilet is designed to handle only three things: water, human waste and toilet paper.
Outside drains and gulleys are their own category. Leaves in autumn are the obvious culprit, especially if the property has mature trees nearby, but the invisible one is silt washing off patios and driveways year-round. A gulley that is cleared out once a year – lift the grate, scoop out the sediment, run a hose through – almost never blocks. One that is left alone eventually stops draining, and then a downpour floods the patio and the water finds its way to a doorway.
If a drain is already blocked, a plunger is worth trying, but only if you are confident about which drain the blockage is in. Chemical drain cleaners are less effective than they look on the label, and the strong ones are corrosive enough to damage older pipework. For anything more than a minor blockage, a professional with a rod set or a high-pressure jetter will clear it in a fraction of the time, without damaging the pipe.
The best thing you can do to protect the drains at your Bournemouth property is a mix of small habits Radiators and central heating one small annual check. Do not put fat, wipes, cotton buds or coffee grounds down any drain. Keep hair-catchers on bath and shower plugholes. Clear the outside gulleys each autumn. Every eighteen months, a professional jetter cleaning of the main run out to the sewer is cheap preventative maintenance, and it catches early warning signs like root ingress or partial collapse before they turn into an emergency.