If your drains aren't properly taken care of you'll most likely experience quite a few clogs in the future. You might be able to fix most of them, but some will end up requiring a Chico Plumber to take care of it.

Clogged drains take up time and you end up having to be creative until the clog is fixed (like washing your dishes in the bathtub). To save you time and energy wondering if what you’re doing is going to cause a clog we’ve created a list of five ways you can easily help prevent future clogs.

1. Say No to These Two

The garbage disposal in your kitchen should really be called a scraps disposal. The list of items that can safely go down the disposal is a whole lot shorter than the list of items that aren’t safe. When it comes to unsafe items, cooking grease and coffee grounds are the biggest.

Cooking grease is deceptive. When you're done cooking it’s in liquid form, but after it cools off it turns into a solid. Pouring it down the drain will allow other food products to begin to pile up on top of the solid grease, which in turn ends up clogging your drain. Avoid all of that by pouring your left-over cooking grease in a plastic cup and placing it in your freezer. Once the cup is full toss it into the trash and pull out a new cup!

While dumping coffee grounds down your drain won’t clog it right away, over time the grounds can build up and cause a clog. Therefore, it is safer to just place them in your compost pile or your garden or on top of potted plants. If you don’t have any of those then you can use your trash can too.

2. Say Yes to Drain Grates/Screens

No matter how hard you try to make sure that the only food that makes it down your garbage disposal are of the safe variety, some will make it past you and into the last place it should go. The same goes for all that hair in your shower or in your bathroom sink. You may do you best to catch it all on the shower wall in order to throw it away afterwards, but you can’t catch them all. That’s why drain grates for the kitchen/bathroom sink and screens for the shower are a thing of beauty. They make it so you don’t have to think as hard when washing the dishes or your hair, while also helping to prevent your drains from clogging.

3. Live by This Motto

"Just because it can go down, doesn’t mean it should."

Your toilet is not your trashcan, don't treat it like one. Using too much toilet paper can clog your toilet but it can easily be fixed with a little elbow grease and a plunger. Yet, if you put your hair from the shower, used q-tips and cotton swabs, or dental floss down the toilet the plunger probably isn’t going to cut it. Save yourself the trouble and use the trashcan you placed next to the toilet for this exact reason.

4. Hot Water vs Cold Water

Running hot water down your sink several times a week or even just once a week can go a long way to prevent any build ups of grease that made it down when washing the pan that held bacon. Same goes for the drains in your bathroom, it will help to melt down anything that may have gotten stuck. BUT when running the garbage disposal always use cold water. This will help keep any solid products that made it passed stay solid so that the disposal can have a chance to break it up. 

5. Keep it Sharp & Smelling Good

Let’s face it, even if you meticulously watch what goes down your garbage disposal it is bound to start smelling at some point. It’s also true that the more you use it the duller your blades will get. Both of these issues are a simple fix, all you need are lemons and ice cubes. Throw in a handful of ice cubes from your freezer and turn on the garbage disposal, once all the ice has been ground up you can place a few slices of lemons down as well. By the end you’ll have sharper blades and a nice lemony-fresh smell.

A clogged drain is just something that everyone has to deal with at some point in their life, but if you follow these steps it can happen a lot less. If you encounter a clogged drain you can’t unclog by yourself just call an Expert Plumber and they’ll get it working properly again.