How Hard is it to Use a Drain Snake?
We’ve had excellent results unclogging the shower drain with this technique adapted from PBS’ Graham Haley: Pack some baking soda into the drain. Pour vingear onto.into it. Enjoy watching the fizzy bubbles! After a few minutes, pour boiling water into it to clear out the baking soda and vinegar. Repeat once or twice. FWIW, we also have a snake and have used it for this drain, too, but it does involve some disassembly and reassembly. We haven’t had to use the snake there since we started the treatment I just described.
As a plumber I recommend not using a plunger. Plungers can compress a clog and make it worse. But yeah, barring a popup in the drain there’s no reason why you couldn’t do it yourself. There’s no piping so weak that a snake could potentially ruin it. The only danger of a snake is it could break off in the line and get stuck. Just use a small snake and don’t push it down past the clog or force it hard.
After googling ‘how to use a drain snake’ it really doesn’t look very hard at all. there are some good guides in that link btw. The plumber was probably just trying to screw you over.
A metal coat hanger usually does the job for me. Same here (drano is a joke). If your pipes are old and thinned from corrosion, or if cheap replacement fixtures have been installed, coat hangers are a bad idea. I tried this once on a bathroom sink in our first house and poked a hole right through the bottom of the P-trap (now I know how to replace one.) The compressed air devices scare me for the same reason: who knows where you might burst an old joint along the line? Try a rubber plunger, but get a flange plunger that seals better on toilets and kitchen disposal sinks (the extendable cup collapses for use on flat drains.) When you take the plunge, the idea is to rhythmically push mostly water and some air through the drain on the downstroke, then suck it back up a little on the upstroke. Short, quick plunging movements work best, and it may take a few minutes of them to unclog the drain.
