How Can I Ruin My Plumbing?

While it’s true that nobody wants to purposefully ruin their plumbing (who wants to deal with messy and costly repairs?), it helps to know what can happen when we unintentionally commit the worst plumbing faux pas. Reading about the ways that you can ruin your plumbing will help you avoid these mistakes—and you can find out when a do-it-yourself fix may work and when you need to call in a professional.

There are five fast and easy ways to ruin your plumbing:

• Flushing the wrong things down the toilet.
• Pouring the wrong things down the drain.
• Too much drain cleaner.
• Driving nails into the wall.
• Combining different metals.

Dealing with a plumbing issue? Don’t wait to call our Durham plumbing pros at JD Service Now at 919-383-7000. We offer emergency repairs, routine maintenance, installations, and so much more.

Five Ways We Unwittingly Cause Plumbing Issues

It might be surprising to learn which plumbing issues come from a simple lack of knowledge on a homeowner’s part. After all, there is no guidebook to tell you what you can and can’t flush down the toilet. There’s no manual that warns you not to pour grease down the drain after cooking. The purpose of this blog is to help you understand what not to do—so you can preserve your plumbing.

JD Service Now is here to help if you’ve accidentally ruined your plumbing by:

• Flushing the wrong things down the toilet. Some things are obvious when it comes to toilet flushing etiquette. Don’t flush toys, food, small animals (not the pet hamster or fish!), or other objects. Others are not so obvious. Some are outright misleading. Even “flushable” wipes should not be sent into your home’s plumbing system. Feminine products should also be thrown away, not flushed. The best way to avoid clogs and other problems is to only flush human waste.
• Pouring the wrong things down the drain. So, you’ve just cooked up some bacon for your family for breakfast. You go to pour the grease down the drain. Stop! This is one of the ways we ruin our plumbing, by pouring the wrong things down the kitchen sink. Grease may be in liquid form when you pour it down, but it quickly solidifies and can cause serious clogs. You should also be careful about what you put in the garbage disposal. Fruit pits, bones, coffee grounds, potato peels, eggshells, and even celery can cause problems with your disposal and your plumbing.
• Too much drain cleaner. When it comes to using drain cleaner to prevent and clear clogs, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. If you use too much drain cleaner or don’t rinse it out of the pipes, the chemicals in it can actually damage certain types of plumbing.
• Driving nails into the wall. If you’re hammering a nail or drilling a screw into the wall, be sure to check for pipes first. You could accidentally puncture or otherwise damage a pipe, leading to a serious leak and the need to repair the wall and the pipe. You can buy a special scanner to look for pipes and studs so you don’t accidentally hit a pipe.
• Combining different metals. If you’re having pipes repaired or replaced, you want to make sure your plumber uses the same type of metal or uses the right material to join together pipes of two different metals. Joining two pipes that are made of different materials can actually cause a chemical reaction that leads to corrosion and pipe bursts. Steel and copper are two such metals that, when jointed, can corrode and eventually burst. Your plumber should use the same type of metal or should use a dielectric union, which allows for pipes to be joined without causing an adverse reaction.

If you’re guilty of any of the above mistakes, don’t worry. You can simply stop doing them before it’s too late, or if you’re already having a plumbing problem, call our team and find out what can be done to fix it. We’re affordable, reliable, and have the tools, equipment, and expertise to get the job done right.

Contact our Durham plumbers at 919-383-7000 today!