Plumbing Prevention/Fix

This document will talk about plumbing prevention as well as what to do to fix your plumbing in the event there is a clog or back-up.

Plumbing Emergencies

See the Maintenance Emergencies section

Preventative Maintenance

When you put things down the drain (toilet bowl, sink garbage disposal, etc) you run the risk of clogging your unit's stack and at worse create a water backup and flooding that's costly and inconvenient.

What to never put down the garbage disposal

1. Coffee grounds (dense, thickly packs together)

2. Pasta (collects and expands down the line)

3. Bones (you'll probably jam/break your garbage disposal machine)

4. Oatmeal (same as #2)

5. Nuts (the oils and physical bits)

6. Onion skins (the membranes catch items)

7. Egg shells (membranes lodge)

8. Fibrous vegetables

9. Potato peels

10. Pits

11. Paint (imagine it drying in your pipes

12. Oils

Preventative maintenance methods

• Citrisol ($100 for a gallon) plumber recommended

• Roebic Main LIne

• Green Gobbler

Plumbing Troubleshooting

What we don't recommend:

1. Draino or lyes, they will damage the pipes, causing them to clog more in the future.

2. Pouring down boiling water

3. Compressed air-based plungers (the building is fairly new but pipes don't respond well to extreme pressures)

What we do recommend:

1. Use a plunger

2. Filled up your sink all the way with water to try to use the pressure to push it through

3. Use a snake drain (if it's the toilet, you can directly insert the snake in, if it's a sink clog, you may need a bucket (to catch the water) and to remove the under-the-sink trap and snake it in directly from there (that is what the plumbers do).

If nothing above worked, we recommend calling a plumber.