Unclogging the Kitchen Sink

We had no sooner than finished the Thanksgiving holiday than we discovered we were starting to have a bit of a problem in the kitchen. Check this out:

Growse. We don’t even have the common decency to remove the dirty dishes from the sink before trying to plunge the sink. Plunging didn’t work at all, by the way, even after plugging up the other side of the sink. Plunging mostly just created a waterfall underneath the sink.

Since both sink basins were equally clogged, we knew the clog was further down the line than the p-traps under the sink. We thought about calling a plumber, but decided we’d try to unclog it ourselves once. We went to the big-box store, and came home with a drain auger that we could attach to one of our cordless drills. We had never used one of these before, but it seemed easy enough. First, we had to take one of the p-traps off:

Then we just kept spinning the drain auger down the drain. We bought a 25′ auger, and we got the entire 25 feet in there without much of a problem. I was getting pretty discouraged. I was expecting to get 5-10 feet into the drain and hit an obvious clog or hairball or something, but I never did encounter any significant resistance with the auger. We got all 25′ of auger into the drain and pulled it all out about 3 times and then put it back together, half expecting it to be just as clogged as when we started.

Even though we never really felt like we found the clog, we must have shaken something loose because the drain worked great after we put it back together. Score one for us, I guess!