Slow Drains

I have noticed that the right hand drain in my double kitchen sink has been a bit slow lately. The left one is fine, which led me to believe that the u-bend was clogged. Tonight the drain became downright balky which created a great deal of concern on my part. Namely the dishwasher drains into the right sink’s drain, just above the suspect u-bend.

I stood there watching the sink not-really-drain as my dishwasher merrily churned away. It would gurgle and blurp, but that was about it. I even tried my tried and true baking soda and vinegar trick. There was some nice fizzing, but no progress. So off went the dishwasher. This resulted in it draining up into the sink. Now I have a sink full of dirty dish water that was oh so slowly draining away.

Dang, it’s clogged and I need to do something about it.

As I patiently let the sink empty, I cleared the cabinet below and positioned a bucket under the offending u-bend. Then I gritted my teeth, unscrewed the pipe and found...

rice, a strand of spaghetti, two Popsicle sticks and more rice.

All of it was in good condition and not too stinky (yay!). The rice was from tonight and the spaghetti was yesterday. My best guess was the Popsicle sticks were trapping things just enough to slow things down until today when the rice clogged it. I have no idea how the sticks got down there. Well I know a small person did it; I just can’t believe that they were able to stuff it down through the trappy thing in the drain.

Of course this drama cause the overflow valve to trip in the dishwasher and it took me a good hour and a half to figure out why the washer wasn’t filling. Luckily I remembered about the valve thing before I ended up hand washing the dishes.