How to unblock a shower drain

A shower drain that has slowed to a puddle around your feet is one of the most common jobs people ask us about, and it is also one of the most satisfying to fix yourself, because the cause is nearly always simple and sitting within reach. It is hair. So before you call anyone, here is how to unblock a shower drain properly, in the order we would do it, and an honest word on when the problem is deeper than a handful of hair and worth passing to us.

First, know what you are dealing with

A shower drain blocks for one reason far more often than any other: hair. Every shower sheds it, and it gathers at the plughole and in the shallow trap just below, where soap, shampoo and shower gel bind it into a dense grey plug. In the harder-water parts of Greater Manchester a film of scale gives it something to cling to, which is why the same shower can be fine for a year and then slow down over a few weeks.

The good news is that this plug almost always sits in the top few inches of the waste, right under the plughole, which is why so many blocked shower drains clear with nothing more than your hands and a bit of patience.

Step one: take off the grate and look

Most shower plugholes have a cover or grate that lifts or unscrews. Take it off. Very often you can see the blockage right there, a matted knot of hair across the top of the trap, and half the job is done just by looking.

Have a bin bag ready, because what comes out is genuinely unpleasant, and a torch helps you see how far down the plug goes.

Step two: hook the hair out

This is the part that actually clears the drain, and the tools are cheap. A flat plastic drain cleaning strip, the barbed one you feed down the plughole and pull back up, drags out more hair than anything else and costs less than a coffee at any DIY shed. If you do not have one, straighten a wire coat hanger and bend a small hook into the end.

Feed it down into the trap, twist it so the barbs or hook catch the hair, and draw it back up slowly. Repeat until nothing more comes out. Keep going past the point you think you are done, because there is usually more than the first pull suggests. If your plughole unscrews to reveal a removable trap, lifting the whole trap out and cleaning it by hand is the most thorough version of this and worth the extra couple of minutes.

Step three: flush it through

Once the hair is out, clear the residue. Run the hot tap or pour a kettle of hot water down, but hot from the tap, not boiling. Boiling water can damage the seals and, in some trays, craze the finish. If you want to shift a greasy soap film, a spoonful of bicarbonate of soda followed by a cup of white vinegar foams up and helps lift it, then flush with the hot water. That is as far as we would go with anything you pour down.

Run the shower for a minute. If it drains freely, you are done, and you have saved yourself a call-out.

What not to pour down it

The bathroom shelf and the supermarket aisle are full of shower drain unblockers, and we would steer you away from them.

• Caustic and acidic drain unblockers. On a solid hair plug they mostly fail, because they need to sit in contact with the blockage and instead they slide past or float on the standing water. What they do reliably is leave a caustic hazard in the trap for whoever clears it next, give off fumes in a small room, and attack the rubber seals in older wastes. Pulling the hair out by hand works better and carries none of the risk.
• Boiling water on a plastic tray or resin trap. It can craze the finish and soften plastic waste fittings. Hot from the tap is plenty.
• Improvised jetting or a pressure washer down the plughole. We have seen the aftermath. The trap is not built for it and neither is your bathroom.

The same hair-and-soap advice applies if you are trying to unblock a bath drain, which is the identical problem in a fitting where the trap sits below the floor or behind a panel. Get the grate off, hook out the hair, flush it through.

When it is not just hair

Sometimes you clear a fistful of hair and the shower still will not drain, or it drains and then blocks again within a couple of weeks. That means the blockage is not in the trap you can reach but further along the waste pipe, and no amount of hooking at the plughole will touch it. There are a few tell-tale signs that the problem has moved past DIY:

• You have cleared the visible hair and the water still stands.
• The shower blocks again within days or weeks of clearing it.
• The shower and another fitting, the bath or the basin, slow down at the same time, which means the blockage is in the shared waste pipe they both run into.
• The water gurgles, or smells, or backs up when something else drains.

At that point clearing it properly means getting into the waste run, and that is our job rather than yours. A blocked shower is closely related to a blocked sink manchester, the same hair and soap in a different fitting, and we clear both by taking down the trap and snaking or jetting the pipe beyond the point you can reach. Where more than one fitting is affected, or the blockage sits in the underground drain that serves the whole property, our drain unblocking manchester team traces the run, jets it clean and puts a camera down if the same blockage keeps coming back, so you fix the cause rather than clearing it every month.

And if the slow drain turns out to be a shower that was never set up right, weak flow, a leaking tray, temperature that swings, our shower installation manchester service covers the shower itself rather than just the drain beneath it.

Either way, if you have hooked the hair out first, you have lost nothing but ten minutes, and most of the time you will not need us at all. If you do, we are on 0161 533 0201.