I was planning on doing a post today about this really cool bank of drawers I’m making for my workbench. But instead of spending my spare time today cutting the pieces for the drawers, I had to fix a clogged drain under my kitchen sink.
I love to cook, but, it’s not often that I make soup from scratch. Usually we just pop a can of soup open and toss it in the microwave. But today, the weather is sort of grey, and a bit rainy, so I decided to make some bean soup from scratch. That’s a whole different blog post, too. Because while I was cleaning everything up, my kitchen sink and garbage disposal went on strike.
I had peeled a bunch of carrots, and peeled a few onions to go in the soup, and when I turned on the in-sink erator, all I got was a mini-whirpool of carrot and onion. Dis-gus-ting!
So I turned on the garbage disposer and instead of watching everything wash down, I got a little whirpool of onion skin, and carrot peel soup.
I tried toggling the garbage disposal on and off. That didn’t help. I tried to use the hand-held squirter to use water pressure to clear the drain, but that didn’t work either. What was strange, was that the other side of the sink worked fine. No clog on the right hand side of the sink, only the left side didn’t work.
large flat blade screwdriver, and medium sized channe-lock pliers
So I grabbed a few towels, my Ace bucket, and a screwdriver, and set of blue channel-lock pliers (thanks Dad for that great gift), and got down on my hands and knees. After clearing out everything from under the sink, recycling, dish-soap, and cleaners, and other stuff, I took a look at the plumbing and immediately knew what to do.
Under the sink may first look scary, but it’s really quite simple. Even though my Dad was 2000 miles away, he had already told me what to do. Between his handyman lessons as things went wrong in the house I grew up in, and all the hundreds of hours of DIY TV that I’ve watched, I felt I was prepared to clean the drain under the sink for the first time by myself.
After clearing everything out, I got down on my hands and knees and took a look to see what was what. It really wasn’t hard to figure out what was happening, and within 15 minutes everything was fixed. I managed to save $80 by not calling a plumber, too!
There are three things to identify under every kitchen sink. There is the Hot and cold water supply. These are small pipes that come out of the wall and are usually copper. There are two mini valves to turn off the water supply. I knew I didn’t have to touch these, because no water was leaking anywhere. NOTE! If you have a leak under the sink, or at your faucet, these would be the first things I would turn off to stop any more water from leaking.
Next I saw the wires and hoses leading to the dishwasher. If you don’t have a dishwasher, then just forget about this step. Since I didn’t do anything to the dishwasher, I knew these weird hoses weren’t the problem either.
Finally, there are these white pipes that come from the bottom of the sink, and bend and twist around merging together, and finally disappearing into the wall at the back of the cabinet. This is where the problem was. I knew this because they come from the bottom of the sink right where the drain is.
1970's era garbage disposal, and lots of pipes.
On the left side (the side that was clogged) you can see the big black ugly garbage disposal, and on the right there are all these white pipes. There is one white pipe running horizontal between the garbage disposal, and the right side, and I knew that’s where my problem was. How did I know this? Because only the left side of the sink was clogged. The right side of the sink drained fine.
Somewhere in that horizontal pipe was a clog. Now I had to get it out and clean it out. Where the white disposal drain meets the disposal there is a metal bracket with two screws. I positioned a bucket below, and carefully undid the screws. I don’t think this thing had been taken apart in a long time, because the screws were STUCK. And once I got them out the metal plate slid out of the way, but the black gasket behind the plate stayed PUT. I had to use a little Gentle Persuasion, to get the seal broken. And when I did, the water came gushing out. Thankfully I had the bucket in place.
There are two small screws that hold a petal plate onto the disposal. Behind this plate is a black rubber gasket that prevents water from leaking out. It's a simple low pressure joint, but once I broke the seal on the rubber gasket, all the water leaked out.
Thankfully, I knew that the water would leak out, so I put my 2.5 gal ACE hardware bucket in the proper place to collect all the yucky water.
Suddenly the sink above was empty, and all the gross water had drained into the bucket. Problem #1 solved. The sink is clean. But that didn’t solve the entire problem. Somewhere in the horizontal white pipe was a clog. I took my Blue Channel Lock Pliers
I used the channel locks to loosen the other side of the disopsal pipe, once all the water drained out.
Once the white nut was loosened, I could gently twist the pipe back and forth and it came completely free. That’s when I saw this:
mmmm Carrots!
The pipe was jam packed with chopped up carrot peel. I took this outside to my compost pile, and used the screwdriver to clean it all out. Then I used a hose to fully clean the pipe. When I was done it was good as new.
Putting everything back together took 5 min. I just reversed all the steps (Installation is the reversal of removal), and turned on the water to check for leaks. None!
Water running down the sink, just like it should.
When I was all done, I could do the dishes, and put back all the stuff that belongs under the kitchen sink. Since it was only 1:45 in the afternoon, I didn’t have a beer.
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