How to Clear Your Bathtub Drain

What To Do If a Slow-Moving Drain Is Turning Your Shower into a Bath

Do you find yourself standing in an inch or two of water after you’ve been in the shower for just a few minutes? A slow-moving drain can turn your shower into a bath. Water backing up like this is caused by a clogged drain. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s usually easy to fix and something you can do yourself. We’ll give you the steps you need to follow to clear the shower drain.

Some homeowners will try using a plunger on the shower drain—while that’s great if it works, it usually won’t resolve a slow-moving shower drain. Others may pour chemicals down the drain—we don’t recommend this as it likely won’t fix the problem and can cause other issues with your pipes. The following process to clear your shower drain will work much better.

1. Remove the Shower Drain Cover

Carefully remove the shower drain cover, making sure not to lose the screws down the drain. Use a flashlight to look down the drain. You may be able to see the clog, which is often an accumulation of soap and hair right at the top of the drain.

2. Use a Shop Vac to Clear the Drain

The best solution, especially if you still have standing water on the shower floor or in the drain, is to use a shop vac (in wet vac mode) to suck up the standing water and vacuum away all the debris clogging the drain. This works 95% of the time! The shop vac is the best solution, but if you don’t have one, you may be able to use needle-nose pliers and a rubber glove to remove the debris at the top of the drain.

3. Clear Badly Cogged Drains with a Plumber’s Snake

After using the shop vac to clear the drain, run water down the drain to see if vacuuming was successful. If the water is still slow-moving, you can use a plumber’s snake (hand auger) to clear the clog. The drain pipe goes down into a p-trap, which is usually where the clog forms. Test to see if this has cleared the clog by running water down the drain again.

4. Replace the Cover

Put the cover back on. You may want to upgrade to a better drain cover that will prevent hair from going down the drain, or you can get a strainer that goes over the top of the drain cover.

Summary

Most of the time, you can use your shop vac to clear the shower drain. If that doesn’t work and you don’t have a plumber’s snake (or if that fails to clear it), contact our plumbing professionals at Handyside. We can send a drain-cleaning expert to your home to thoroughly clean the shower drain and save you from standing in water every morning.