Hi,
I have a quick question, perhaps someone might have been in my situation before.
The background to the story is the following: We moved into the current apartment 1.5 years ago and ever since we moved in, we have been having constant issues with the drainage pipes in the kitchen. We had to call in a plumber every 2-3 months to un-clog the pipes as the same pipe connects both the drainage from the kitchen sink as well as the dishwasher. The plumber told us that the apartment has a major issue as during the constructions phase, some âgeniusâ decided to add a âU-shapeâ on the drainage pipes in the Kitchen walls, when in fact it should have been a straight line. That U-shape stores everything until it clogs which happens every 2-3 months. The plumber has also shared that this issue was known to them as the previous tenant kept reporting the same problem.
HEREâs to my question: Can I do anything about this against the landlord since he was aware of this problem but never disclosed it to me? It is also not mentioned in the Handover protocol that we got when we signed the lease.
Personally Iâd just get myself a drain unblocker and move on.
Presumably youâre not having to pay the plumber yourself?
The U bend should be underneath the sink, rendering it possible to easily remove, clean and refit, normally without even needing any tools. Yes, embedding it into the building was stupid.
You can mitigate the problem by ensuring that you have hair traps in the sink/shower drain and that you always flush plenty of hot water through if you ever put anything greasy down the kitchen sink.
It depends how far in the wall is the U-shaped pipe. We also have a construction issue: the pipe from the kitchen goes horizontally under the floor of the kitchen and the living room, thus it gets clogged pretty quickly as well. I have this tool, but it is too short and doesnât reach the clogged place.
Maybe ask next time about the distance to the clogged place. If it is not too far, maybe you can use such tool indeed. There are also longer tools available.
You can try discussing this amiably first with the landlord, see if he/she/it is willing to cover some of the costs as this could be considered a building maintenance need. But if landlord is not willing to budge itâs a tough one to argue, as you could also cause/worsen the clogging by throwing stuff down the sink etc. May be worth to join/ask the tenants association for advice. It may mean a lawsuit, independent expert evaluation, and fees on top of feesâŠ
This doesnât surprise me one bit. The landlord may just claim âit was draining fine when you moved inâ. It"s a tough one to inspect when doing a handover.
Or, depending on the severity of it, find a way to live/deal with it yourself. There is no perfect building anywhere.
Yes, I had to buy a longer one for one of my apartments a few months ago. The blockage was something around 4m down the pipe, but it runs slightly down from the under-sink trap, then flattish for two metres or more, then round a 90 deg (Iâm guessing) bend downwards. The longer one also has a thicker cable with a wider end piece on it, which would no way go round that bend.
Ended up taking the end bit off and replacing it with a part of the older short and narrower one which was flexible enough to get round and down to the blockage.
Iâm aware that many owners simply tell their renters to use some âproductâ - had to clear out a neighbours one couple of years back when they had a refugee Ukrainian family in and that;s what theyâd been told. But the years of grease and hair and god knows what that was down there was far too much for any chemical to have shifted it. In that case I didnât even need the unblocking tool, just removing the U bend and drain pipes allowed me to clear the mess by hand.
Best advice I can give is this - clear any hair from the plug drain every single time you use it. Do not just try to wash hair down the plughole, it may clear the initial obstacle but thatâs the main cause of blockages when it gets snagged on the inside of a pipe join or other pre-existing partial blackages.
Neighbors were flooding my kitchen from time to time. The agency was paying for plumber emergency, the guy could never find the culprit as I never had a chance to catch it as the water was coming in (you guess, it always happened during work hours) and all apartments up there didnât have any issue nor incident. But hey, indeed I never paid for the plumber, nor paid for the damages when moving out.
They can get hair catchers that fit over the drain hole.
I do wonder that the OP is flushing down the kitchen sink?
Grease and oil should should be collected and disposed off in the garbage/recycling.
Food scraps should go in the bin.
The dishwasher should be regularly run on the hot/intensive cycle and not just the ECO one.
Iâd like to clarify a couple of things as I see a lot of people have been offering suggestions on what to do to avoid clogging the drain pipes.
I want to specify that I am not throwing anything in the kitchen sink that shouldnât be there. The purpose of my post was not to seek advice on how to avoid that. In fact, the plumber already told me that this situation is unavoidable due to the poor design of it. The U-shape is not under the sink, it is in the wall, last time the plumber came in he had to use an extractor to clear the debree in the wall. He said that the long term solution for this would be to dissassemble the entire kitchen furniture, break the wall section where the pipes go through, replace the U-shape with the proper straight pipe and assemble the kitchen back in.
I am also not being asked to pay for the plumbing fees as these are covered by the landlord, a.k.a. rental company. However it is very tidious and annoying to not be able to use the kitchen sink or dishwasher (because the pipes are connected) for a few days every couple of months, having to wait for the plumber to come in. If I would have known of this issue I would have certainly not taken up the apartment. My question is if I can hold the rental company liable for all this?
If you are not a member of the tenants association you should join. They will know exactly how to approach the landlord with your complaint. It costs peanuts to join.
Yes, we understand that the U-bend is hidden in the wall and not under the sink but irrespective of where it is, a U-bend should not need unclogging every three months in normal use.
I can only think that something else is wrong as well - perhaps the drain pipe is partially clogged with building rubble so gets blocked easily.
If the u-bend is in the wall but under the sink then itâs not going to be particularly difficult to chip away at and around the plaster to gain access to it and move it.
We had a drainage pipe from a bathroom with a diameter of 10cm hidden in the plaster with another pipe in front of it fastened to the wall.
The fixing screws for the external pipe went through the hidden pipe and it was fine for the first couple of years but the screw holes got bigger over time causing a leak.
I can see one very obvious reason, they wanted to save the space under the sink where the U-bend would normally sit, and to avoid having a proper hair-trap drain in the shower, and to save costs by minimising materials needed.
unscrew the drainage top from the sink drain hole, if possible/needed.
wiggle a drain snake as far as you can into the drainhole. as you wiggle it, it will find itâs way further down to dislodge stuck junk.
take the snake out, fill the sink with water and apply a drain plunger repeated vigorously and fast âŠ
do the same in your bath tub/shower drain.
Hope this helps âŠ
this worked for me, in an older building, while my roommate was regularly dumping coffee grinds down the kitchen sink 2-3 times a week over many years ⊠with the dishwasher installed, eventually water started backfilling into the bath tub After treatment through bath tub, itâs all good for quite some time now âŠ
After treatment through bath tub, itâs all good for quite some time now âŠ
