my drain bathroom sink
With the high number of emails sent about drain bathroom sink issues I decided to write up a post devoted to some issues related to my most common bathroom sink jobs.

There are such a wide variety of problems with bathroom sink drains that I'm not surprised at all to see how all the questions out there on them.

If you think about it, these poor drains are taking one of the most brutal attacks of all drains. With all of the wide variety of things going down these drains, it usually causes issues.

Clogged Drains:

Call Your Local Plumber: Yes, snaking pipes with a snake is not hard but more times than not the average home owner is going to snake a pipe the wrong way. Do you know what happens to a wrongly snaked pipe? I have had to replace so many pipes in walls because people break their pvc pipes with huge snakes that they thought were needed.

There are so many little things that can go wrong when just snaking a pipe. I would say the most common thing done wrong when snaking a pipe is the homeowner renting a huge snake from a general rental place and tearing apart their pipes in the walls. Bad news.

Second most common problem is using drano or drain cleaner. This is a very common thing for women to do I've learned. Their hair is stuck in the drain really bad, so lets go get drain cleaner. Some of these drain cleaners wreck the darn pipes they are hazardous. No drain cleaner liquid is going to break down a clod of woman hair and we all know that.

Leaky Drain Systems:

These drains are bound to leak because frankly.. anything with enough use is going to wear down and become less effective. A leaky drain can either just leak water through while your in the bath or it will leak water through the floor from the upstairs to the downstairs. Hopefully it is not leaking through your ceiling that is drywall..

To fix this, can be very simple of very difficult like most things in the plumbing field.

Bottom Floor Bathroom Drain of Tub: The bathtub will have to come completely out to change out the drain. Yes there may be tiles and everything surrounding the tub that will have to be removed too so that the tub can be taken out. Hopefully this is not your case.

Bathroom sink drain: Easy fix. Buy a new replacement drain and unscrew the bottom nut holding the bottom drain on and install the new bottom drain. If your talking about the actual drain with the  pvc drain and trap than that is a totally different topic. I know it is hard to understand the difference at times though. Please refer to the pvc trap section of the site for that info.

Upstairs bathroom drain: Now that the bathroom upstairs we can get to the drain from the basemetn to remove it. There is a nut that needs to be unscrewed from underneath the tub to remove it. If your lucky you can just cut out a chunk of drywall and get your hands in there with some tools to remove it. Easy as pie.

Upstairs bathroom Sink Drain: Same goes as for "downstairs sink drain."