Clearing Slow and Blocked Drains
Tommy Bynum clears slow and blocked drains in Gastonia homes: kitchen sinks, tubs, showers, bathroom sinks, toilets, laundry lines and floor drains. Call (704) 825-4463 and tell us which fixtures are affected. If sewage is backing up anywhere, stop running water in the house and call. We’ve been working in Gastonia homes since 1979.
- Serving Gastonia since 1979
- Licensed plumbing contractor (L.12997)
- 500+ Five-Star Google Reviews
What Drains Do You Clear?
Kitchen sinks, including the disposal and dishwasher lines. Bathroom sinks, tubs and showers. Toilets that won’t clear with a plunger. Laundry standpipes. Floor drains in basements, garages and utility rooms. If a drain in your house is slow, gurgling or backing up, call (704) 825-4463 and tell us which one and what else is affected.
Is It One Drain or the Whole House?
Count the fixtures before you call. If one sink, tub or shower is slow and everything else drains normally, the blockage is close by, usually in the trap or the first few feet of branch line. If several fixtures are slow at once, or a shower fills when the toilet flushes, the problem is further down where those branches join, and that is the main line.
One fixture is slow
The blockage is local. Kitchen sinks are usually grease and food; tubs and showers are usually hair and soap; a bathroom sink is usually both plus toothpaste and product residue. These clear from the fixture side, and we’ll let you know how to prevent it from happening again.
Several fixtures are slow, or gurgling
That points past the branches to the shared line. Gurgling is air being pulled through standing water, which means the line is partly blocked. Sewage backing up into a tub, shower or floor drain is the same problem further along. Stop running water in the house and call.
What we do when it's the main line
The first job is finding out whether the line is blocked or damaged, because those need different work. A blockage is grease, roots or sediment narrowing a pipe that’s otherwise sound, and clearing it puts the drain back to normal. Damage is a cracked, collapsed or root-split pipe, and no amount of clearing holds for long. We start by clearing, because that’s what most main-line calls turn out to need. If the line won’t stay clear, or the way it clears tells us the pipe itself is the problem, we stop and tell you what we found before you spend anything more on it.
Roots are the common reason for main line blockages in older Gastonia neighborhoods. Just over half the houses in the city were built before 1980, and roots eventually find the joints and grow toward the water. Clearing cuts them out, but they may keep returning.
Two things make an older line worse. Cast iron and clay tile were standard for drain lines before plastic, and both have joints and rough interiors that give roots a way in and give grease something to hold. Piedmont clay subsoils swell and shrink with the weather, which works on those joints for decades.
Why Do Gastonia Drains Keep Clogging?
Gastonia runs a Fats, Oils and Grease program, and its own guidance names household drains as one of the main ways grease enters the sewer system, “most notably the kitchen sink.” Grease goes down warm, cools, and sticks to the pipe wall, and every food scrap after it sticks to the grease. Two Rivers Utilities maintains 485 miles of sewer line and more than 20,000 connections, and grease is the thing it spends the most effort keeping out.
Grease from the kitchen sink
Meat fat, oil, butter, sauces, dairy and baked goods all leave grease, which is why a kitchen drain usually gets gradually slower rather than blocking overnight. The city’s advice is to scrape it into a container and put it in the trash, and to keep a strainer in the sink. Used cooking oil is accepted at the Gaston County Landfill on Philadelphia Church Road in Dallas.
Hot water and drain chemicals do not fix it
They move the problem. Gastonia’s Clog-Free Sewers handout warns that hot water and detergents claiming to dissolve grease “only pass it down the line and cause problems elsewhere.” Caustic drain cleaners are worse than useless on a real blockage, because they sit in the pipe damaging it and then have to be dealt with by whoever opens the line. If you already poured something down, tell us when you call.
A disposal grinds food, it does not stop grease
Worth knowing because it’s widely misunderstood. The city’s handout is blunt: “Home garbage disposals do not keep grease out of the plumbing system.” A disposal makes solids small enough to leave the sink, and grease still coats the line the same way. If your kitchen drain keeps clogging and you have a disposal, the disposal isn’t the fix and it’s probably not the cause either.
What Happens When You Call Us
A drain call runs the same four steps whether it’s a slow bathroom sink or a main line. You tell us which fixtures are affected, because one drain and several drains are different problems. We work the fixture side first. You get a price before anything starts. Then we clear it and run water through it to confirm it’s actually clear.
The four steps
01. You tell us which fixtures are affected. One drain or several is the first question, and it usually tells us what we are dealing with before anyone leaves the shop.
02. We work the fixture side first, and move to the shared line if the problem isn’t there.
03. You get the price before work starts. A $95 diagnostic fee covers the visit and is waived when you approve the work.
04. We run water through it before we leave, and tell you what caused the clog so you have a fair chance of avoiding the next one.
Drain Cleaning Across Gaston County
We clear drains in Gastonia, Belmont and Kings Mountain, and across Gaston County from our shop at 2232 Plastics Drive in Gastonia. Being based in Gastonia helps us respond to drain cleaning calls ASAP. A blocked kitchen sink is something you want fixed right away.
Drain Questions From Gastonia Homeowners
Not for grease, and the City of Gastonia says so directly. Its Clog-Free Sewers guidance warns never to flush grease with hot water, because the hot water does not remove the grease, it “only pushes the problem further down the sewer line,” where it cools and sets again somewhere less convenient. Boiling water can help with a light soap or hair film in a bathroom drain, and it’s a reasonable first try there. On a kitchen sink that has been getting slower for months, it buys a day.
Mechanical clearing, which means physically removing the blockage rather than trying to dissolve it. Caustic drain cleaners rarely clear a real clog, they sit against the pipe while they fail, and they are hard on older pipes and rubber gaskets. On the roughly half of Gastonia homes built before 1980 that matters more than it would on new construction. For a slow bathroom drain, pulling and cleaning the trap solves it more often than any product will. If a drain has stopped completely, that’s a call rather than a product.
Because the blockage was cleared and the cause was not. A drain that clogs every few months usually has buildup further along the branch than a quick clearing reaches, a slope that is not quite right, or a problem on the shared line rather than at that fixture. Clearing the same drain twice a year costs more than finding out why once. Tell us it is a repeat when you call, because that changes how we approach it.
For a bathroom sink or a tub, a small hand auger is a fair thing to try, and it will pull a hair clog out of a trap. Two cautions. On a toilet, the wrong tool scratches the porcelain, and on any line, a cable that gets stuck or breaks off turns a small job into a bigger one. If it does not come free easily, stop.
What it costs depends mostly on how far down the blockage sits, not on which fixture is slow. A trap or a short branch line is the cheapest thing we do. A main line takes different equipment and more time, so it prices differently, and we’ll tell you which one you are looking at before we start rather than after. You get the price before any work begins.
A $95 diagnostic fee covers the visit and the diagnosis, and it is waived when you approve the work.
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