What Causes Clogged Sewer Lines?

Sewer clogs may well be the most common home repairs most people undertake. Dealing with them means either the expense of calling a professional, the inconvenience of dealing with a landlord or the stress of DIY repairs. Far simpler, in most cases, is to just prevent the clog in the first place by good home management.

Clogged sewer lines are a considerable inconvenience as well as a health hazard. Discovering that a line is clogged can ruin a significant portion of the day. While clogs will always exist, their number and severity can be minimized, because a lot of them are due to user behavior.

Foreign Objects

Many public toilets have signs in varying degrees of good or poor taste telling users not to flush anything but body waste and toilet paper. Residential and business sewer lines are usually less than four inches in diameter. Anything that can knot itself around or ball itself up, like a cloth or a sponge, can clog the line. A particular danger is paper products. Toilet paper is designed to break down rapidly to prevent clogs. Other papers can cause a clog.

Grease

Cooking grease should never go down a drain. It adheres to uneven places in the sewer wall, eventually forming a substantial clog. Commercial cooking establishments are required to have their grease hauled away. Householders should let grease cool and pour it into a sealable container in their trash. Scrub greasy cookware before washing with salt and a paper towel, which then go into the garbage. Oil and grease from automobiles should never go into the sewer system.

Hair

The most common cause of household clogs is hair. Bathing or showering causes hairs to break, and shaving into a basin puts substantial quantities of hair down the drain. Any drain that will be exposed to hair should have a screen filter, which should be cleaned after each use. Commercial drain cleaners are designed specifically to dissolve hair clogs, but their use should be minimized because of the danger to pipes.

Laundry Fiber

Home washing machines have a filter on their drain line, but consumers may remove it. Laundry fibers tangle and form clogs just as hair does, but drain cleaners will not dissolve them. Such clogs must be manually removed, usually with a plumbers’ snake. They can be prevented by aggressively filtering all water discharged from a home washer, or by diverting such water entirely into a separate graywater system.

Tree Roots

Never plant trees near sewer lines. Thirsty roots find any weakness, whether a hairline crack or a flaw in a seal. Roots form huge balls inside the pipe, requiring a power auger to clear. That does not end the process, since such pipes should be replaced to prevent recurrences. Removing the tree helps, too.

Maintaining sewer lines can be hard work. Most of the expense and exertion can be avoided though. Do not put anything down a sewer that will clog it up, and the result will be far fewer clogs than in neighboring systems.