Drain Cleaning in Compton

Outside, usually within a few feet of the house on the side the bathroom is on, or out toward the curb. It is a capped pipe at or just below ground level, and on older lots it is frequently under planting, a later path or a slab of concrete somebody poured over it. We find it, and we show you, because knowing where it is turns a bad night into a short one.

It changes where the problem shows and what it costs to reach. The lowest fixture is a shower or a tub rather than a floor drain, so that is what backs up first; and the lateral runs under the concrete, so locating a fault precisely is the difference between opening a small piece of floor and a large one.

It is a trade saying rather than a standard, and the usual version is: water runs downhill, hot is on the left, and do not chew your fingernails. The first one is the only one that matters to a homeowner, and it matters more here than the joke suggests. Drainage has no pump — it works entirely on fall. That is why a belly in a line, a section that has settled so it holds water, cannot be fixed by cleaning it: there is nothing wrong with the pipe except its angle. It is also why the fixtures lowest in a house are the ones that report trouble first, which on slab construction is your shower rather than the floor drain you do not have.

The figure people are usually looking for is the trap arm: it should fall about a quarter of an inch per foot toward the stack, and the distance from the trap weir to the vent is capped by code according to pipe size. But the question behind the question is generally 'why does my sink drain slowly when nothing is blocked', and the answer is usually that a run was extended during a kitchen or bathroom remodel without keeping its fall. That is common in houses here, where a modern fixture frequently drains into whatever was already under the slab. It is not a blockage, and no amount of clearing improves it.