Why Plumbers Own Drains Never Clog The 2 Dollar Monthly Habit

TITLE: Why Plumbers’ Own Drains Never Clog — The $2 Monthly Habit They Don’t Advertise CHANNEL: Roger the Pipe Guy DATE: 2026-06-20 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Ever wonder why the plumber you called to unclog your drain never seems to have drain problems at his own house? I mean, think about it. The guy shows up, snakes your line, charges you 200 bucks, and goes home to pipes that flow perfectly. It’s not because he’s got some magical plumbing system or expensive equipment hidden under his kitchen sink. It’s because he does something once a month that costs him about $2, and he has absolutely no reason to tell you about it because your clogged drain is how he pays his mortgage. In this video, I’m going to show you the exact monthly routine that keeps a plumber’s home drains running clean year after year. We’re talking the full system, not just one trick, but every habit that works together to make sure you never have to call for a drain cleaning again. And stick around to the end because I’m going to show you a one-minute bathroom sink trick that eliminates the number one cause of slow drains in most homes. Let’s get into it. Keeping your drains clear is honestly one of the easiest things you can do as a homeowner and one of the most overlooked. It doesn’t take special skills. It doesn’t take expensive products. It just takes a simple routine that most people never learn because, frankly, nobody in the plumbing industry profits from teaching it to you. Once you understand how buildup happens and what stops it, this whole thing clicks into place. So, let’s start with why drains clog in the first place. Here’s what most people don’t realize. A clogged drain is almost never a sudden event. It feels sudden because one day the water just won’t go down, but that clog has been building for weeks, sometimes months. Every time you wash dishes, take a shower, or brush your teeth, tiny amounts of soap scum, grease, food particles, hair, and skin oils go down the drain. Most of it washes through just fine, but a small percentage sticks to the inside walls of your pipes. It’s like plaque building up in an artery, a little bit at a time, so slowly you’d never notice. Until one day the opening is so narrow that everything backs up. Now, here’s the important thing. Chemical drain cleaners, those bottles you see at the hardware store with the skull and crossbones, they are not the answer. I cannot stress this enough. Those products use caustic chemicals that can eat away at your pipe walls, especially if you’ve got an older home with cast iron or galvanized steel pipes. I’ve cut open pipes that were damaged more by drain cleaner than by the clog itself. The chemicals can also generate heat inside the pipe, and in the case of PVC, that heat can soften joints and cause leaks you won’t find until there’s water damage in your ceiling. So, forget the chemicals. What we’re going to do instead is prevent the buildup from ever getting started. And that brings us to the core habit. This is the big one. The monthly hot water and washing soda flush. If you do nothing else from this entire video, do this. Washing soda is sodium carbonate. You’ll find it in the laundry aisle at most grocery stores. Arm and Hammer makes a box of it called super washing soda. It usually costs around three to four dollars for a 55 oz box, and that box will last you about two years of monthly treatments. So, we’re talking pennies per month. Now, washing soda is not the same thing as baking soda. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, and it’s much milder. Washing soda has a higher pH, which means it’s more alkaline and it does a much better job of dissolving grease, soap scum, and organic buildup inside your pipes. It won’t damage your pipes, it won’t create toxic fumes, and it’s been around for over a hundred years. Here’s exactly how to do it. Once a month, pick a night when you’re done using the sink for the evening. Boil a full kettle or a large pot of water. While the water is heating up, pour about half a cup of washing soda directly into the drain. Then slowly pour the boiling water down after it. The hot water activates the washing soda and pushes it down through your pipes, dissolving and loosening any buildup clinging to the pipe walls. The reason you do this at night is simple. You want that solution sitting in your pipes for as long as possible, working overnight while nobody’s running water. By morning, the next time you turn on the faucet, everything that was loosened just washes away. Do this on every drain in your house. Kitchen sink, bathroom sinks, shower drains, even the bathtub. I do mine on the first of every month. I set a calendar reminder on my phone and the whole process takes maybe 15 minutes for the entire house. Now, if you’d rather use an enzyme-based drain treatment instead, that works, too. Enzyme cleaners use natural bacteria that literally eat organic material inside your pipes. They’re completely safe for all pipe types. You pour them in at night, same idea, let them work while you sleep. They cost a little more than washing soda, usually around eight to twelve dollars a bottle, but a bottle lasts several months. Either method works. The key is consistency. Pick one and do it every single month. Next up, and this one is so simple it almost feels too easy. Put mesh strainers on every single drain in your house. Every one. Kitchen sink, bathroom sinks, shower, bathtub. This is your first line of defense, and it’s the cheapest plumbing investment you’ll ever make. For the kitchen sink, you want a stainless steel mesh strainer that sits right in the drain opening. These catch food particles, small bits of debris, anything that has no business going down your pipes. For bathroom sinks, they make small stainless steel mesh discs that sit right over the drain. They catch hair, toothpaste chunks, and soap pieces. For the shower and bathtub, you want a flat silicone or stainless steel hair catcher. Hair is the single biggest cause of shower drain clogs, and a $2 strainer stops it completely. You can find all of these at any hardware store or online. A full set for every drain in a typical house will run you about 10 to 15 dollars total. Clean them out every few days or whenever you notice build-up. In the kitchen, I empty mine after every big cooking session. In the shower, I pull the hair off after every shower. Takes about 3 seconds. That little mesh screen is stopping debris before it ever enters your pipes, which means your monthly washing soda flush has less work to do. The two habits work together. By the way, if you’re finding this advice helpful, you should know it’s just a small sample of what I’ve put into my new book, 100 Old House Fixes That Save You Thousands. It’s packed with practical old house fixes that can help you avoid expensive repair bills. To grab your copy, you can scan the QR code on the screen right now or just use the first link in the description below. All right, let’s continue. Now, we need to talk about grease because this is where most kitchen drain problems really start. And I need you to hear me on this one. Zero grease down the drain. None. Not even a little bit. Not even with hot water running. I don’t care what anybody told you. Grease does not wash away. Here’s what actually happens. You pour hot grease down the sink with the hot water running. And sure, it flows right through the trap and out of sight. Feels like it worked, right? But about 15 to 20 ft downstream, where the pipe runs horizontal through your floor or wall, that grease hits cooler water and cooler pipe walls. It starts to solidify. It coats the inside of the pipe like candle wax building up on a candle holder. And every time you send more grease down there, another thin layer gets added. Over months, that build up narrows the pipe until nothing gets through. And the worst part is this happens in a section of pipe you can’t reach with a plunger or a basic drain snake. You need a professional with a power auger to clear it. And that’s a service call. So, here’s what to do instead. Keep an old coffee can, a mason jar, or any container near your stove. When you’ve got bacon grease, cooking oil, pan drippings, anything greasy, pour it into that container. Once it’s full, toss it in the trash. For greasy pans and plates, wipe them down with a paper towel before they go in the sink or dishwasher. It takes 5 seconds and it removes 90% of the grease before water ever touches the dish. And here’s one more habit that goes hand in hand with this. After every use of your kitchen sink, especially after washing dishes, run the hot water for about 30 seconds. Just let it flow. That hot water chases everything through the trap and further down the line while it’s still warm enough to keep moving. It’s a tiny thing, but over time it makes a real difference. Let’s talk about two more spots in your house that need attention. Your garbage disposal and your toilets. If you have a garbage disposal, it needs a monthly cleaning. Food particles get trapped under the splash guard and around the grinding plate. And over time they rot and create both odors and build-up that feeds into your drain pipe. Here’s my method. Once a month, dump about two cups of ice cubes into the disposal followed by a half cup of coarse salt, like kosher salt. Run the disposal with cold water for about 30 seconds. The ice and salt scrub the inside walls and the grinding plate clean. After that, cut a lemon or lime in half and grind both halves through the disposal with cold water running. That takes care of the odor. And remember, always run cold water when using the disposal, not hot. Cold water keeps any grease in the food solid so the disposal can chop it up and send it through. Hot water melts the grease and then you’re back to the same problem we just talked about. While we’re at it, here’s what should never go down a disposal. Pasta, rice, potato peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, celery, or any fibrous vegetable. These either expand with water, create a starchy paste, or wrap around the grinding mechanism. Now, your toilets. This is simple. The toilet is designed for two things: human waste and toilet paper. That’s it. Nothing else. Not facial tissues, not cotton balls, not dental floss, not cat litter, and especially not so-called flushable wipes. Those wipes are one of the biggest lies in household products. They do not break down like toilet paper. I’ve pulled wads of them out of sewer lines that look like they went in yesterday, even though they’d been down there for months. They snag on pipe joints, they catch other debris, and they create blockages deep in your sewer line that can cost $500 or more to clear. Throw them in the trash every single time. Now, let me explain why your plumber has never sat you down and told you all of this. It’s not because plumbers are bad people. Most of us genuinely want to help, but here’s the reality of the business. Drain cleaning calls are what we call bread and butter work. They’re quick, they’re easy, and they pay well. A typical drain cleaning service call runs between $150 and $300, depending on where you live. The plumber shows up, spends 20 to 40 minutes, and moves on to the next call. It’s steady, reliable income. The average homeowner calls for a drain cleaning about two to three times over a 10-year period. That’s somewhere between $400 and $600 spent on something that is almost entirely preventable. Compare that to the cost of doing what I just showed you. A box of washing soda costs about $4 and lasts 2 years. That’s roughly $24 over a decade. Mesh strainers cost $10 to $15 and last for years. We’re talking maybe $40 total over 10 years to prevent $400 and service calls. There’s no money in prevention. No plumber is going to run an ad that says, “Hey, buy a $2 box of washing soda and you’ll never need to call me.” That’s just not how the business works. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just economics. The information is out there if you go looking for it, but nobody in the industry has any incentive to push it until now. So, consider this your insider tip. Let’s talk about some common problems you might run into and how to handle them. First, if you start this monthly routine and your drain is still running slow, that probably means you’ve already got significant buildup in the pipe. The washing soda flush is a maintenance habit, not a cure for an existing clog. If you’ve got a slow drain right now, you may need to start with a good manual snaking to clear the existing buildup and then begin the monthly routine to keep it from coming back. Second, if you hear gurgling sounds when water drains, that usually means there’s a venting issue, not a clog. Every drain in your house is connected to a vent pipe that goes up through your roof. If that vent gets blocked by leaves, a bird’s nest, or ice in the winter, air can’t flow properly and you get that gurgling sound. This isn’t something the washing soda will fix. You’d want to check your roof vents or call a professional to inspect them. Third, if you’re getting a bad smell from a drain you don’t use very often, like a basement floor drain or a guest bathroom sink, the problem is almost certainly a dried out P-trap. The P-trap is that curved section of pipe under every drain. It holds a small amount of water that acts as a seal against sewer gases. If a drain sits unused for a few weeks, that water evaporates and sewer gas comes right up into your your house. The fix is dead simple. Just run water in that drain for about 15 seconds every couple of weeks to keep the trap full. Fourth, if multiple drains in your house are slow at the same time, that’s a red flag. It usually means the blockage is in your main sewer line, not in individual branch drain. This is one situation where you absolutely want to call a professional. A main line blockage can involve tree roots, a collapsed pipe, or a major grease build-up deep in the system. Don’t try to handle this one yourself. And fifth, if you do everything right and still get an occasional slow drain, don’t panic. Sometimes a little extra build-up happens, especially in older homes with rougher pipe interiors. Just do an extra washing soda treatment that week, and if it doesn’t improve within a day or two, a simple hand snake from the hardware store, about $15, will usually take care of it. Now, for that bonus tip I promised at the beginning. This is the one-minute bathroom sink trick. And once I show you this, you’re going to wonder why nobody ever mentioned it before. Pull up the pop-up stopper on your bathroom sink. That’s the plug that moves up and down when you pull the rod behind the faucet. On most sinks, you can just grab it and pull it straight up, and it lifts right out. On some models, you might need to twist it a quarter turn first, then pull up. Once it’s out, look at the bottom of it. I can almost guarantee you’re going to find a disgusting clump of hair, soap scum, and slime wrapped around the base of that stopper. This is the number one cause of slow bathroom sink drains, and it has nothing to do with what’s deep in your pipe. It’s sitting right there, 2 in below the drain opening, choking the flow. Clean it off with a paper towel. You can use an old toothbrush to scrub the rod and the stopper or Then look down into the drain opening. You’ll probably see more gunk clinging to the pivot rod that connects to the stopper mechanism. Clean that out, too. Reassemble, push the stopper back in, and run the water. I promise you that drain is going to flow like it’s brand new. Do this once a month, same day you do your washing soda flush, and you will likely never have a slow bathroom sink drain again. It takes 60 seconds, and it prevents probably 80% of bathroom sink clogs all by itself. Every plumber knows about this, and most homeowners have never once pulled that stopper out to clean it. Before you go, I want to make sure you know about my new book, 100 old house fixes that save you thousands. It goes deeper than we can in a single video with practical fixes, warning signs, and simple steps for older homes. If you want to avoid expensive repair bills before you call a plumber, this book is for you. Just scan the QR code on the screen or click the link in the description to get your copy. Thanks for watching. And if you haven’t already, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss the next one. Set that calendar reminder tonight. First of the month, 15 minutes, every drain in the house. Your pipes will thank you, and your wallet definitely will.