Clogged Drains Begin With Hair?
If you don’t want to have to deal with clogged drains in your home, then the best thing you can do is to avoid getting them in the first place.
Most people have had to unclog a drain at least once in their lifetime. It can be a messy, gross thing to have to deal with. Just the smell alone that comes out of that clogged up pipe can make your nose sting and make you want to get sick. Much less, the nasty goo that can come out of some of these clogged up drains!
Therefore, many will agree that the best way to handle a clogged drain is to avoid. While avoidance isn’t always the best route to go in many life situations, there are some where it’s absolutely the best option. Avoiding drain clogs is one of those situations.
Clogs begin to form because of the things that are put down the drain. Even if all you ever put in your drain is what was meant to go down, you could have inherited the previous occupants problems.
Unless your home is new and you’re the first one living there, other people have already spent time using the plumbing system, and there’s no way to know what all has gone down the pipes or what’s already beginning to clog up the drains in your home.
The shower drain is a particular place many people don’t pay much attention to. But have you ever had a backup in the shower? It begins with a drain that is slow to flow out the wastewater. You’ll notice as you shower that the water doesn’t flow out faster than your showerhead lets fresh water in. The drain should always remove the water and not let it gather in the tub. It should flow straight down the drain with no pooling.
If it doesn’t that means there is already a problem going on in the drain, a clog is already forming. That also means someone has let things like little pieces of leftover soap bars and other things fall down in the drain. Then as you shower, hair falls out of your head and goes down in the drain, getting stuck to the little bar of soap that got stuck because it didn’t dissolve.
These two things alone can cause a ball of webbing that collects other things. As the wad of debris gets larger, it gets denser as well and less water can flow through. That means murky, mucky water soaking your feet whenever you shower…Yuck!
A hair strand has an outer layer called the Cuticle which is formed much like fish scales. If you run your fingers down a strand of hair (or a fish from head to tail) you feel a smooth surface. But run your fingers the opposite way on the strand (or fish) and you can just barely feel the scales pop up like on the fish, sticking to what is touching them.
That’s why hair sticks so easily to objects in the drain. Especially wet objects that have gotten soft from being in water. And the longer the hair is, the more likely it is to make a web of goo that acts like a net in the drain.
There’s no way to keep the hair on your head from falling out when you shampoo, so the next best thing is to avoid letting anything else the hair could grab onto get down in the drain. Also, after a shower, just take a second to throw out the hair that got caught in the drain strainer. These two simple steps can keep your shower flowing freely and keep your feet clean!
