Enough with the bleach for clearing a kitchen sink blockage and if you are on a septic tank system, you are killing much-needed enzymes and bacteria in the septic tank.

Most kitchen sink back-ups are due to putting the wrong type of waste products (foods and plant life) in your garbage disposal or too much waste products at one time. Clogged sinks are also from pouring grease (like bacon, chicken and beef fat) down the drain.

Do any of you remember that tin or glass jar Grandma use to have filled with bacon grease? It wasn’t just for making biscuits and gravy folks. It was because grease should not be dumped down the drain!

Although people think that by running hot water while dumping grease will keep it from solidifying, it won’t. Grease turns into a liquid form when heated, but there is a science to the liquefying of grease that enable chunks of non-liquidized grease to “drop” into the drain and may not get flushed fully from the p-trap. (The j-shaped pipe under the sink.) Another thing is as the hot water travels down the drain line, the water cools down; the grease solidifies which then becomes gooey-blobs of solidified grease.

When in the solid form it is able to stick to any other minor obstruction in the line. A minor obstruction could be some other type of solid waste that did not flush fully out of the waste line such as ground food products from the garbage disposal or hairline roots, (feeder roots) an unknown pipe offset or break in the line or even, if by chance, toilet paper and grease decide to take a ride together, the grease will weigh the toilet paper down and it will rest somewhere down-line until enough water or inertia of other waste forces it down the line. Of course, then there is a chance the line has dried and the gooey-blob has now adhered itself to the pipe like “dog-doo to a shoe”, especially if it is an older cast iron pipe system. The gooey-blob sitting on the bottom of your drain line (pipe) may then stop other objects from passing, causing… drum roll please! A blockage.

So, now that you have traveled down your sink drain to your main sewer line as a gooey-blob of grease and you grouped all your other objects of attraction together, like ground food products, toilet paper, and other solid waste products; do you see why bleach will not work? Bleach is defined as “to remove color or stains from” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bleach) which is not an acid or degreaser, but a chemical that removes color. Sure there are other types of bleach, but those too will not dissolve the probable cause of your blockage. Even with calling a plumber and having them take apart your drain and running a snake, the grease build-up will eventually cause another blockage. Snaking a drain does not always clean the pipe of all build-up, depending on what type of snake attachment is used on the end, it could just be making a small hole in the grease that will allow water flow, but it will develop a blockage again.

The best solution for a recurring grease blockage is to replace the p-trap and Don’t Pour Grease Down The Drain.

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