Often, people rinse more than water down their drains, not thinking about where the chemicals or other liquids could lead. However, rinsing things down the sink aren’t good for the environment or your pipes.
For starters, it’s never a good idea to rinse household or automotive chemicals down any drain in your home. These cleaning products and chemicals will make their way into lakes and oceans, causing serious damage.
Do not put any pesticides down the drain, along with any cleaning products, germicides, or antiseptics that contain mercury.
Several common items people rinse down the sink are from the kitchen, but they still don’t belong in the drain. Throw away items including sauces, dairy products, meat fats, lard, cooking oil, butter, margarine, shortening, baking goods, and food scraps, coffee grinds, egg shells, and produce stickers. Grease, in all of its forms, will harden along the sides of the pipes and eventually block them after a period of time.
Many of the other items, such as food scraps and egg shells, just don’t dissolve over time, so eventually they will clog the pipe, or need a professional cleaning.
Check the labels on the cleaning products in your home. Any product containing quaternary ammonia sanitizers (often found in fabric softeners, commercial cleaners, and pine oil cleaners) should be avoided.
Other items that you should not rinse down the drain include grease from cars and lawnmowers, motor oil, transmission fluids, anti-freeze, pieces of garbage, flushable cat litter, paper towels, solvents, nail polish and nail polish remover, or medication of any kind. Products of this sort can corrode the entire plumbing system, which means you’d need an entire plumbing remodel to fix it.
If the pipes in your home do become clogged, only use drain cleaners as a last resort.
Pipe Gripes is written and published by Thompson Plumbing Heating & Cooling .
(Flickr Photo by vanz)
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