If you’ve ever had to call a sewer or drainage plumber in a blockage, you know that having a blocked sewer is not the best experience. Without the main sewer line functioning the way it should, everything in your home – and your neighbour’s houses – gets blocked up, producing a terrible smell and plumbing issues. Blocked sewer plumbers in Fitzroy and Melbourne provide the most common causes of blocked sewers so that you can avoid them in the future.
- Damage To The Sewer Pipe
If you keep getting frequent backups in the sewer system around your home, even though you’re careful with what you put down the toilet and the drains, it might mean that there’s damage to the sewerage pipe. If a sewerage pipe in the drainage system has ruptured or is damaged in any way, you’ll have recurring problems. The most common causes of recurring blockages include pipe corrosion, leaking joints, or shifting soil beneath it. You could even find damage in sewer drains due to heavy traffic, or abnormally heavy equipment on the ground above it. Of course, you can’t avoid driving down your street; however it is the ground above, below and around the sewer pipes that keep shifting and settling due to the weight of traffic, which causes the breakage.
- Sewer Line Sagging
Although this is out of your control as a homeowner, it is possible to have sagging sewer lines below and around your home. It happens over time, which means that you might not even know of the impending damage until it happens. Sagging sewer lines occur because the ground around it is sinking. Also known as “bellied” pipes, once sewer lines begin to sag, waste and water can’t pass through it, because it starts to block up at its lowest point. For sewer lines to be functional and effective, they’re supposed to be straight and streamlined. If there’s any kind of sagging, you’ll get a blockage.
- Tree Root Damage
Are there a lot of trees around your home? Trees growing too close to a drainage system can become a problem. If tree roots below ground grow too close to the pipeline, they can crack and break them, causing them to leak. Worse, yet, tree roots can even start growing through and along the pipe, causing a severe blockage in both directions. If a drainage plumber finds this in a sewer, the tree roots will need to be cut away and removed, so that the sewer line can be replaced.
- Flushing The Wrong Items
When you have a blocked sewer, your first thought will be that someone has been flushing the wrong things down the toilet. In some instances, this is the case. For the health of your plumbing system, you should know what you can and can’t flush. Items such as sanitary pads, tampons and nappies should be thrown away, not flushed. These items are manufactured to be super absorbent. They even expand when they come into contact with liquid, which means that they could cause a blockage quite quickly over a short period of time. Other items, which are smaller, such as earbuds, wet wipes, cotton wool balls and floss, only add to the problem. For future reference, the only things you should be flushing down the toilet is human waste and toilet paper.
- Grease From Cooking
When you cook especially fatty meats, the grease can be a nuisance to dispose of. The lazy, and incorrect way to dispose of food grease is to pour it down the drain. However, this is one of the worst things you could do to your drainage system. When grease is hot, it melts, which is why it is so easy to pour down the drain. However, when it cools, it hardens into a congealed mass. If you pour cooking grease down the drain, you’re effectively putting an impending blockage right down your drainage system. Over time, this grease collects on the sides of the pipes like cholesterol, getting thicker the more you add to it. The best way to get rid of cooking grease is to wait for it to harden so that you can throw it in a dustbin.
If you want to avoid the expense of calling a blocked sewer plumber from Fitzroy or a drainage plumber from Melbourne, you should be aware of what can cause a blocked sewer. Although some of the most common causes are out of your control as a homeowner, having your sewers inspected regularly can save you a mountain of stress and an expensive bill.