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Are You Cleaning Your Shower Drain Often Enough?

It might seem unnecessary to clean your shower drain if the water is going down just fine, yet doing so can help you catch hair and debris before it becomes a problem. Though you may pick up stray hair left on the shower or tub floor, it may not be enough since lots more goes right down the drain and needs to be removed. Ideally, you should aim to clean your shower drain at least once a month.

In the span of just one month, a drain can collect an obscene amount of hair. This is particularly true if you have long hair, a big family, or if your shower or tub is used by multiple people. A product called the Drain Weasel can help extract any stray hair that might be in the shower drain. It's a long plastic rotating handle attached to a wand with a micro-hook tip. The results can be a bit chilling but also gratifying. Any long gobs of hair in the drain effortlessly lift after being gently wound up. In the long run, cleaning your drain and removing stray hair from it can save a lot of time and effort. Once a drain clogs, you may be plunging regularly trying to remove the clog. If it gets beyond the point of fixing it yourself, you can wind up wasting hundreds of dollars on a plumber.

Signs you drain may be clogged and how to prevent it

There are some signs to look for that signal you may have a clog in your shower. The obvious sign is that the water starts to pool around your feet while you shower, and it may drain more slowly than usual. That's when you should act on fixing the drain, instead of waiting until the water just stops going down completely. Other less obvious signs include a sewage-like odor coming from the drain; or there may be hair, dirt, or mold collecting around it.

While it's vital to remove the existing hair, another way to keep a shower drain clean is to place a device that will catch the hair as it falls. The TubShroom is a small silicon hair strainer that fits right in any standard-size drain. It is filled with holes on all sides of the cylinder-shaped device which claims to catch every stray hair. Simply pull out the small gadget after each shower use and remove the hair that has gathered.

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