
Clogged Drain
When a second fixture starts acting up alongside the first, the blockage has moved out of the trap and into shared pipe, and that's past what a plunger reaches.
When this becomes an emergency
- The kitchen sink holding water long after the dishes are done.
- A tub that drains fine in the morning and backs up by evening.
- Water rising in the shower when the washing machine empties.
- A sour smell coming up out of a drain that used to smell like nothing.
What a pro does
The first question a plumber answers is how far down the trouble sits. One slow fixture points at its own trap or the short branch behind it. Two or more, especially the lowest ones in the house, and he's looking at the main. A lot of small-town Alabama housing stock still runs original cast iron branch lines, and those don't clog the way plastic does. They scale, meaning the inside diameter shrinks year after year until an ordinary amount of grease has nowhere to go. He'll cable the line first to restore flow, then decide whether the pipe itself is the problem. On a septic property there's another layer, because a house drain that keeps backing up sometimes isn't blocked at all; the tank is full or the field is saturated, and no amount of cabling fixes that. Camera work settles the question. Then the line gets flushed and the fixtures upstream get run to confirm water's actually leaving at a normal rate.
Frequently asked questions
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