Hair snake

Here’s a story from a couple weeks ago.

My shower drain started backing up. My sister had had the same problem with her bathtub and had to call a roto-rooter guy to come snake the drain. Mom had said she had a device to do it, but she couldn’t find it. But she went online and found a similar thing, so then we headed to Home Depot (after a couple other stops) and secured a hair snake. Two actually. They were only $3 each.

Basically it’s a long piece of plastic with upward-facing spiky pieces that you stick down the drain. The hair gets caught on the spikes and stick to the snake as you pull it up out of the drain.

We tried it out and the first pass brought out a lot of hair. So much that we had to cut it off of the spikes. Then I went in again, this time a little farther, and friends, what I pulled up was so nasty and smelled so terrible, I gagged a little. I mean, it was still just hair, but it had been down there so long that it was just pure black sludge. My god, it was awful. Thankfully I was wearing gloves!

A couple more passes and the hair snake come up clean-ish. After that we put some baking soda followed by vinegar down the drain to cleanse it a little bit. Then I ran some hot water to make sure everything was flowing well, and it was.

Do yourselves a favor and put a note on your calendars to snake your drains once a quarter or twice a year or so before they start backing up!