Hi. I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. Slow running vanity sinks? Slow running bathroom tubs? Nothing can be more annoying. It backs the water up, it brings the dirt and everything right up in your tube. I’ve had some luck in the past using my snake to unplug these things, but to do that, you have to take out the drain trap, you have to take the top off in the vanity. I found a new product that I think that a homeowner could use that might be very useful with quick, easy and safe tip where you won’t damage your stuff. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll show you how to use it.

And the inexpensive product that I’m talking about using is called a “zippit”. Basically, what it is is a flexible plastic with these little plastic barbs on it. They are sharp. I mean obviously, not dramatically sharp. I wouldn’t let little kids play with these, but the neat thing about this is it won’t damage your metal on your tub and it doesn’t require pulling the top out of your sink. Here, let me show you how to use it.

The only downside that I have to making this video is currently, I don’t have a slow running drain. As you can see, I turn my water on, it takes the water down right quick. You can see that this hair right here is exactly what happens. This hair get sucked down into that drain and then gets caught around this pop up and the armature around the pop up. Most of the time, that is what’s causing your slow flow. Now, the nice thing about this product is—typically for a snake, I would have to take this out, I would have to hand direct the snake down into the hole to make sure that I don’t scratch up the surface. Because this is flexible and plastic and has these little plastic barbs on it, I can actually slip it in with the pop-up still in place and basically slide it all the way down to the hilt. Now once it’s in there, I can jiggle it around a little bit. As you can see, even with a clean running drain, it’s still pulling some dirt and debris out of there. Now, I’m going to go ahead and take this in some of the other sinks in my house and I’m going to try them also just to show you and maybe we’ll get better results from there. Maybe we’ll have some better luck in my kid’s bathroom. They don’t have a tendency to pick up the hair and it’s tidy as we are. But still as you can see, the drain runs a little slower than the other one but not bad. So basically, what I’m going to do is I want to take the zippit and do the same thing as I did on the other one, stick it all the way down in there, move it up and down a little bit. Not bad. I’m going to go ahead and go to another side of the pop-up, go ahead and shove it down there and see if I can find something on that side. There we go. There comes some more. I don’t know what that is but…

As you can see, even with a drain that’s running clean, hair is already starting to accumulate inside there. You get too much of that hair in there, this drain slows down and then finally stops.

Okay. Here we are in the bathtub. I want to pull the pop-up out although you don’t have to. This drain also is running clear but I want to show you this X that’s here inside of this tub. That’s where most of the hair clogs are going to get clogged up. Now it’s pretty obvious that it’s clean. But if the pop-up were on here and I was to slide alongside the pop-up, these barbs would grab that hair and pull it back out of there. Nine times out of ten, that’s going to be your problem. And here we are down at my nasty stationary tub. Although the water seems to run fairly freely and goes down the drain, we don’t use the strainer as much as we should or as much as most people do, so I’m sure that there is a lot of debris that gets bypassed in this drain so I’m going to go ahead and send this down in there and see if I can. I’m snagging some of it up but let’s go ahead and try in a different spot. Yep, there is some lint right there coming out. I’m sure that if that was let go too long, that would also clog up the strain and make this a slow drain.

Now, as the date of this posting, I paid $2.15 for this. I think it’s well worth the effort. If you have a slow drain in a bath tub or a shower or a vanity as far as a hair clog, or even down stair stationary tub for lint and stuff. Just go ahead and give this a shot, before I would definitely do this, before I would break out my snake or go call a plumber.

I’m Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. I hope you liked this tip. See you again real soon. Thanks.