Drain services in Athens

Nothing, and not because the products are bad — because on a slab house there is no floor drain to put it in. The access point that matters here is a cleanout OUTSIDE, at the wall or out by the curb, and it is the thing worth knowing the location of before you need it. It is also what every advertised drain price quietly assumes: a $49 advert buys a cable through an accessible cleanout and nothing more. If yours has been paved over, planted over or built over, that price was never going to apply to your house, and finding that out at eleven at night is the expensive way.

Mechanically, and in this order. A plunger with the overflow blocked off, which is the step most people skip and the reason plunging often seems not to work. Then a hand snake past the trap, which costs about twenty dollars and solves a great many shower and sink drains. If neither moves it, the blockage is past the trap and into the line, and that is a machine through the cleanout rather than anything you can pour. None of this is fast in the sense the question hopes for, but all of it is faster than waiting for a product to work and then calling anyway.

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.

More than any house has — a four-inch building drain carries a large number of fixture units, and residential plumbing is nowhere near the limit. Which means if several fixtures in your house are slow at once, capacity is not the explanation and you should stop looking for one. Something is restricting a line that was sized with room to spare: scale narrowing cast iron from the inside, roots at a joint, a belly holding water, or an obstruction. Those are four different problems with four different answers, and a camera distinguishes them in about a minute.