What Is the Best Type of Drain Cleaner to Use?

Many of our clients ask us what the best kind of drain cleaner is. This is a great question to ask, as keeping the water flowing through your drain freely without obstruction is very important and will help you to avoid problems such as clogs and bursts in the future.

However, the answer as to what drain cleaner you should use might surprise you. For professional help with drain maintenance, get in touch with Clark Drainage today.

Which Type of Drain Cleaner Is Best?

The short answer is that drain cleaning chemicals should be avoided at all costs. Although they might have some effect on the debris sticking to the side of your pipes, they are also incredibly corrosive and will reduce the lifespan of your metal or PVC pipes significantly.

The nature of drain cleaning chemicals requires them to be intensely corrosive and destructive. However, they do not discriminate; whether they are in contact with the clog in question, the walls of your pipes, or, in many unfortunate cases, human skin, they will start to cause damage.

Repeated use over the course of months or years will cause several weaknesses to appear. These weaknesses will eventually wear through until there are cracks, leaks, and total collapses in the pipes which will cause water damage and flooding.

It is also worth noting that certain chemicals should be avoided due to being utterly environmentally-unfriendly. These chemicals are best used very sparingly and in specific situations, they should not be poured down your drain.

In short, there might be a drain cleaner that is most effective at clearing a clog, but this same chemical will be the most effective at eating through your drainage system itself!

Enzyme Cleaners: A Middle-Ground?

Enzyme cleaners provide a suitable and less damaging alternative which can work in a lot of situations. This chemical works effectively, but only on organic materials. Although it won’t break down the toy car blocking your pipe, it won’t ruin your metal or plastic pipes either.

When the enzyme cleaner comes across things like food, human hair, greasy ‘fatbergs’, and many other ‘usual suspects’ when it comes to drain blockages, it will start to break it down very quickly and encourage it to move on through the pipes.

Again, because your pipes are inorganic, the enzyme cleaner will have no effect. They are biological compounds which break down organic materials while being perfectly safe to use and entirely harmless for the environment.

What About Professional Cleaning?

The surest way of ensuring that your pipes run freely without obstruction and clogs is to leave it to the professionals. With the right equipment and training, we are able to quickly make sure that your pipes are kept in peak condition.

The process involves using a high-pressure water jet to flush water through your system at incredibly high pressures. This will break down anything in its path that shouldn’t be there and force it to move onwards into the public sewer system.

Although this sound very disruptive, the process is very straightforward and streamlined. Although many people are put off by images of our team in muddle overalls and big boots wrecking your home, this is far from the case (not least because our personnel are very presentable!).

In fact, we are able to carry out the process without direct access to the property very often. So long as there is a manhole or some other form of access outside the property, we can just use this, and from arrival to departure the entire process can take as little as one to two hours.

This is by far the best method of ensuring that your drainage system remains as healthy as possible which means you will give yourself the best chance of avoiding any form of blocked pipe or burst, and scheduled cleaning is much more affordable than you might anticipate.

Get in Touch

With the equipment and talented technicians that we have at Clark Drainage, you can be sure that your cleaning programme is both reliable and effective.

We offer solutions for both smaller domestic properties as well as large commercial facilities. Give us a call today on 0808 164 0776.

Alternatively, fill in our contact form, and one of our sales team will get in touch with you as soon as possible.