Drains are forgiving until they aren’t. The fortnightly hair pulled out of a bathroom trap is a non-event — right up until a year of fortnightly events compresses into the kind of mat that needs a power cable. Almost every recurring blockage we see could have been prevented by three small, dull habits. Here they are.
The kitchen sink — manage what goes in
Hot cooking oil and rice water are the two biggest causes of a slow Malaysian kitchen drain. Oil cools inside the U-bend and waxes onto the pipe wall; starchy water sticks to the wax. Three months of nasi lemak preparation later, the diameter is half what it should be.
What to do instead: keep a tin or jar by the stove for used oil. When it’s full, it goes in the bin, not the sink. Rinse rice over a sieve into a bowl, pour the water onto the plants, throw the rice grains in the bin. The minute you spend doing this is the hour you don’t spend mopping the floor under your sink when the trap finally backs up.
Run hot water after every cooking session
Two litres of just-off-the-boil water poured down the drain at the end of cooking emulsifies the day’s small oil residues so they make it out to the riser instead of solidifying at the trap. This is more effective than any commercial drain cleaner, and free.
Bathroom — a strainer per drain, no exceptions
Hair-catcher strainers cost RM 8 and last years. We don’t understand why so many apartments don’t have them. Put one on every shower drain and basin pop-up. Empty them weekly when you scrub the bathroom — it takes ten seconds. You will never see a hair clog again.
Floor trap discipline
The floor trap in a Malaysian bathroom is also the smell barrier between you and the sewage stack. If the water seal evaporates (because the bathroom is unused for a week, say), the smell comes up. Pour a litre of water down each floor trap before you leave on a long trip. If you have a guest bathroom you don’t use often, do this monthly.
Once a year, schedule a check
If you live in an older building, ask us to run a camera through the main stack once a year. It’s a thirty-minute visit, costs around RM 250, and finds problems before they leak through to a neighbour’s ceiling. It’s much cheaper than the day after the leak.
What we don’t recommend
Aggressive caustic drain cleaners ruin both your pipes and our tools. They burn the rubber on cabling and the seals on hydrojetters, which is partly why we charge more when one’s been used in the system. If you must use a chemical, hot water + a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda + a cup of vinegar, left for thirty minutes, does most of what the harsh stuff does without the damage.