Does shaving in the shower clog the drain? While you may want to attribute shower drain clogs to longer hairs from your female family member’s heads, single men may know better. The truth is that shaving in the shower can clog it too, even though the hair from your face or legs is much shorter than head hair.
Many times, shaving in the shower seems okay because it doesn’t fully clog the drain. But even if your shower drain has just slowed down without stopping, that’s a good sign that you’re doing damage to your plumbing system.
Why Does Shaving Clog the Drain?
Unfortunately for many plumbing systems, hair is the perfect material to make a clog more serious. It’s not water soluble and even strong drain cleaning chemicals don’t dissolve it well (which is just one of the many reasons you shouldn’t use these chemicals).
Smaller and longer hairs may become a tangled mat in the drain. They’re especially liable to stick together because they attract and latch onto oils. The oils that find their way into your shower are usually from your body and cleaning products. This is why it’s a good idea to avoid pouring any oily products, like kitchen oils, down your shower drain. Hair and oil is a bad combination.
While your clog may have been started by soap scum, hard water, or longer hairs, shaving in your shower will make it much worse. The small hairs will work right into the preexisting clog.
Avoid Shower Drain Clogs
If you’re already shaving in your shower, you’ll probably keep running the risk of making a clog. That’s fine—you don’t need to stop shaving in your shower to avoid the clogs. Simply install a drain screen to catch the hair for you before it goes down the drain. You’ll have to clean it out after use, but that’s much less inconvenient than dealing with a clog.
If you switch to using your bathroom sink, be sure to protect it from clogs too. When shaving at your bathroom sink, you can even use a towel, newspaper, or other impermanent solutions to catch the hair. Or, you can purchase drain screens that fit on these drains too.
What to Do If Your Shower Drain has Been Clogged By Hair
So your shower has started draining slowly, or not draining at all, after you’ve shaved in it, your hair probably contributed to the clog. If so, using drain chemicals will not be effective. Caustic chemicals have a hard time dissolving hair. If they are strong enough to dissolve the hair they can also do damage to your pipes, which can create more serious problems.
Using chemicals is a lose-lose situation. When they don’t work, you’ll have caustic chemicals sitting in your drain, which turns the drain into a safety hazard. You’ll want to avoid the fumes from the drain and definitely not stick anything down it. These chemicals also make work much harder for your plumber.
Instead of pouring sometime down the drain, call your plumber. They will chose the right solution for your clog problem. Usually, this will involve using a plumbing snake or suction equipment to remove all traces of the clog, so you don’t have to worry about it again. In some cases, they may also choose to perform a sewer camera inspection to make sure that there aren’t other issues compounding the clog.
We’re not a nationwide plumbing service, but if you’re in Danville, Lafayette, Martinez or anywhere in Contra Costa County, you’re in luck! Just call or contact us to get started.
