When my husband and I left our Brooklyn two-bedroom for the suburbs, we made sure to take the fancy-pants shower head we had installed years ago, said Kim Fusaro. (Don't worry, we put the old one back for the next tenants.) The main bathroom in our new house is WAY outdated, but our high-tech shower head—with, like, 15 different settings—made it feel almost 21st century.
Unfortunately, while our hair was getting showered with the rain-forest setting, or whatever, it was more like a swamp down at ankle level. The shower WOULD NOT DRAIN. Which meant we'd be standing in, like, four inches of dirty water while trying to get clean. So gross.
I bought a fancy drain snake that attached to our drill to yank out the gunk, but the pipes were too winding to get it down. I generally try not to use chemicals (this is the tub we bathe our kids and pets in) but to bust up this mystery clog, I tried back-to-back-to-back chemical drain-openers (every brand Home Depot sells) and…NOTHING.
I thought we were going to have to call a plumber—sad trombone—when my husband found the magical pipe-clearer: He changed the setting on our shower head to a more gentle one. It turned out the problem wasn't that our drain was too slow, it was that the water was coming down too fast. Makes sense. When the shower was installed (in 1923, when the house was built) it probably had a rinky-dink little shower head, and the pipes couldn't accommodate a 21st-century water flow. The less-aggressive setting spelled the end of the shower swamp. Hooray!
Are clogged drains a problem at your house? How do you fix them?
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