Sometimes, it’s easy to form bad habits when handling things at home out of convenience. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t care for our home, but time and effort are often conserved with these shortcuts that, unfortunately, lead to plumbing damage that causes more headaches and a repair bill to pay. Ask any plumber in Millcreek, Utah and other residential zones about what are the most common culprits that render their services necessary, and you’ll find that you might be guilty of one of these habits:
- Flushing trash down the toilet
If there’s no trash can nearby or if it’s full, it gets that much more tempting to flush down that single swathe of toilet paper. It gets worse, however, when people start dumping food in the toilet or sometimes even plastic materials.
Some common materials that end up finding their way down the toilet include grease, cat sand, cigarettes, feminine products like tampons and sanitary napkins, and cotton. No matter the reason you may have for disposing of these, there are better and more discreet methods that won’t end up clogging your toilet and costing you a complicated repair job that can affect your whole plumbing system.
- Misusing the sink’s garbage disposal
This waste disposal mechanism has been a handy tool that can help reduce a lot of landfill accumulation and is a more convenient way to tidy up after eating or during meal preparation. This usefulness has made it a mainstay incorporated into most homes today, with the latest publicly released American Housing Survey revealing that over 96% of households have complete kitchen facilities inclusive of sinks.
This means hundreds of thousands of waste disposal systems that can be subject to misuse by way of overloading and putting in the wrong kinds of items. Think bones, coffee grounds, grease, oil, and veggies like celery. These are bad for your disposal as they can damage the blades and even clog it up. Even when people throw in waste that is supposedly good to go, they also tend to put in too much at once, overloading the system.
Simply making sure that you dispose of small portions at a time and avoiding the big no-no materials can go a long way in increasing the lifetime of your system.
- Letting the shower drain clog
Having some hair go down the drain at some point is pretty much inevitable for anyone who bathes. The problem is that most people who have hair fall in the shower even let it go down the drain instead of disposing of it in the trash. That is one of the biggest culprits for clogging.
While you can always clean out the drain yourself, a build-up can cause damage to your pipes that can lead to leaks and flooding that even travel up to them in your walls.
If you’re experiencing damage as a result of these actions, it may be time to call a professional to repair your plumbing. To prevent further costs, all it takes is to avoid these habits moving forward.
