Separate Your Plungers For Good Health
By Reporter Joseph Toth
Washington Micro Bank BBS
Submitted: 12-26-08
There is a difference between a sink plunger and a toilet plunger. I recently watched someone use a ‘three quarter ball’ plunger in their kitchen sink. When they were done, they walked it back to it’s spot in the bathroom next to the toilet. I didn’t know if I should have laughed, or contested what just happened as I watched her fill the kitchen sink with dirty dishes after the old water went down. She was drawing another sink full of water to do these dishes.
Without sounding rude or critical, I asked if there was another plunger in the house. She said that was the only one (as I watched her start to wash dishes in that sink, and being thankful I wasn’t staying for lunch). I politely educated her on the fact that there is a difference between sink and toilet plungers.
I told her a sink plunger has a one third or half ball. A toilet plunger has a three quarter ball. You don’t want to use a toilet plunger in a sink because trace fecal matter will travel through the water to the sides of the sink where it may stay and later transfer to your hands or the dishes you will be putting away. As I was telling her this, … she suddenly paused for a couple seconds, staring at the sink as if it were full of live snakes. I uncontrollably expelled a split second chuckle and told her to just add a quarter cup of bleach to the dishwater. Bleach kills everything.
She looked at me with a weird look, then started giggling as she said “guess who won’t do that again?”. I told her the next time she’s out and about, she should pick up a sink plunger and dedicate it to just sinks and tubs, … not toilets. I recommend getting one from a hardware store. Doing so will assure she has one for years and years to come. I recommended staying away from the plastic gimmick plungers that work like bellows because plastic plungers don’t give a good water tight seal like a rubber plunger. As it turned out, she was appreciative for my involvement.
Since I’m touching base with clogged drains here, … I should mention there are new tools available for clearing and maintaining drains in sinks. Hardware stores have devices that attach to the end of your garden hose and get inserted into the target drain being serviced. Once the device is in the drain, you turn on the garden hose and the device expands against the walls of the drain, locking it in place as a powerful high pressure stream of water drills into any drain obstructions and knocks them clear down to the lateral, and eventually the sewer system.
These are safer alternatives to using things like chemicals or a pump-up ram. Rams have been known to blow pipes apart at the connections by these sudden blasts of air. Chemicals are dangerous and can cause burns or eruptions. Eruptions can happen when acids and bases are mixed. The drain opener chemical being a acid, can be very dangerous when pouring it into a clogged drain, especially when the material clogging the drain is not entirely known. Emergency rooms across America know what drain eruptions can do, it’s not pretty and can cause blindness and disfigurement of the face and arms of anyone in it’s way. The use of a ram in buildings with non-metal pipes can cause plumbing damage by blowing apart the glued connections on PVC piping, creating the costly expense of tearing out walls to fix the plumbing break. This won’t happen with metal pipes because metal pipes are threaded and screwed together. Newer homes use the plastic PVC pipes and for that reason, should detour from any idea of using a ram to clear clogs.
