Maintain Your Drainage Pipe System

An organized and functional kitchen - whether ours or friends' - always gives us pleasure to prepare and cook wholesome, nutritious meals for family and friends.

To ensure we derive maximum utility from our kitchen (or bathroom or toilet), we regular maintain the drainage piping system in our flat.

Here's what we did:

Check and clear floor traps
You should check there is always a floor trap in the kitchen, bathroom or toilet. And the floor trap should be seen, not hidden behind a partition in your bathroom or beneath a raised kitchen floor.

We should know - our contractor / ID did not heed our instruction and concealed the floor trap behind the partition wall, making access difficult, if not practically impossible.

The floor trap serves a dual purpose: 1 - prevents pests like cockroaches from entering your flat from the drainage pipe, and 2 - traps dirt such as hair - yes, each family member sheds a lot of hair during a shower!) from clogging the drainage pipe.

Clear your drainage pipe regularly with boiling / hot water
Regularly maintain your kitchen plumbing system by pouring a full kettle of boiling water down the sink once or twice a week. Or after we did a lot of cooking and washing, such as on festive occasions.

The hot water will melt and clear cooking grease, fats and oils that may have accumulated in the drainage pipe.

CAUTION: Some sinks and wash basins have plastic discharge pipes that may buckle under boiling or very hot water. If your sink is fitted with such pipes, avoid using boiling water. Use a proprietary cleaner like Kleen Drain, or similar products.

Use paper towel to clean off grease, oil and fat
Better still - we use a paper towel to wipe off excess oils and grease in our woks and pans and throw the soiled paper towel into the waste bin. Then we use dishwashing liquid to wash and clean the utensil.

That way we reduce the likelihood of cooking oil and grease choking our kitchen drain pipe.

Toilet bowls can get choked by too much tissue.
Not all toilet rolls are the same. Some rolls have thicker 2, 3 or more ply of tissue, while others are too thin and tear easily.

Likewise, not all toilet bowls are the same. Depending on the design, some bowls have a narrow discharge pipe. Which can become choked by too much toilet paper.

Therefore, be judicious in your usage of the toilet roll. If you must use a lot of toilet tissue, flush the cistern each time after using 3-4 tissue paper - just to ensure your toilet bowl is not choked.

Time the toilet bowl's discharge of the content
Each time you flush the toilet you should check that the water takes a reasonable time to be fully discharged from the toilet bowl.

If it takes longer than usual, it may be an indication some tissue - trapped in the neck of the toilet bowl - is hindering the water movement. When that happens, we flush the bowl another one or more times, until we are satisfied the water is discharged within the usual time. That usually dislodges any toilet tissue that may be trapped within the bowl neck.

Don't assume your maid knows
Don't forget to tell your maid never to flush girl's sanitary pads or baby's sanitary napkins (e.g. Pampers) into the toilet bowl.

Foreign maids - especially those from poorer countries - usually clean themselves with water and thus may not be acquainted with the use of toilet paper or sanitary pads. *grin*

They therefore need to be properly instructed. Our plumber tells us that's a very common cause of toilet choke - maids flushed Pampers down the toilet bowl!