Fat can make your arteries clog, but also the drainage of your kitchen sink

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Professionally, I am dealing with the drainage system of the human body: the lymphatics . Last week, I needed to deal with the drainage system of our kitchen sink. And lo and behold, similar to the blood vessels of the human body , fat seemed to have also played a role in creating the blockage of our kitchen sink drainage pipe. The flow had become more and more sluggish over the last weeks and it was finally completely stuck. First, I cleaned - as usual - the U-bend, but it was surprisingly clean. Then I thought that the overflow drain might be the culprit. It was indeed completely stuck. It is easy to remove it completely for cleaning: you only need to loosen the screw where it’s attached to the sink, at the other end it’s not even connected to the main drain with a hose clamp, you can just pull it off. The clot that caused the blockage was gross, but cleaning it did not improve the situation at all.Then I opened the pipes at the very bottom where they leave the apartment and cleaned them with a 2 meter long drain cleaning brush, but I could not sense any blockage and that did not help either. However, it was clear that the blockage was downstream because when I poured water into the pipes, it quickly filled up the pipe to the top and only very slowly, the water level was falling. Then I remembered the 130 ton fat clump that was blocking a major sewer in London a few years back ( https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/12/total-monster-concrete-fatberg-blocks-london-sewage-system ), and perhaps, a fat clump was as well to blame. To dissolve the fat, I decided to pour quickly lots of hot water (not boiling but the hottest that our hot-water system could provide, which is 54°C) down the drain (perhaps around 100 liters). With this treatment the blockage disappeared instantly and completely.

Sewer on Michael’s Domain

Fat can make your arteries clog, but also the drainage of your kitchen sink