Day 14. Cleaning Sink Drains

Day 14 of “A 30 Day Guide to Spring Cleaning“.

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Sometimes sink drains can be the worst! They can get smells to them, they get buildup inside them, it seems like no matter what you do you can’t get the smell to go away if you do end up getting a smell in your sink drains. Sometimes, the buildup in our sink drains makes our sinks drain slow and not work properly.

Let me show you a really quick and easy way to clean your sink drains, and get rid of any smells for good!

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What to clean:

• Sink drains in kitchen
• Sink drains in bathrooms
• Bathtub drains (I mean why not, we are already working on drains!)

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Supplies Needed:

• Large bowl
• Distilled vinegar
• Baking soda
• Drain Snake ‘paid link’ (optional but great for clogs like hair in your bathtub)

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Cleaning Your Sink Drains

To start at the very beginning of this, make sure you drain is not clogged with hair. You can absolutely use something like Draino to remove clogs, but please understand that there is the potential for large clogs to just move farther down your drain using items like this, if there is too much hair clogging your drain.

If your drain is clogged by hair (which is the most common issue in bathrooms and bathtubs), use the drain snake to push into the clog, slightly twist and pull the drain snake out. It will start pulling out the items clogging your drain. Repeat until it seems all debris has been removed.

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Step 1: Clean your sink, your drain basket, and make sure the sink and drain are clear of debris. You can just use soap and water for this step, or just water. You just don’t want to flush debris down the drain when cleaning.

Step 2: Take out the drain baskets, and pour baking soda into the drain. I don’t have a set amount for you, just make sure the drain entrance is coated well. If you are doing this in a bathtub or bathroom sink, you don’t need to remove the plug/stopper unless it’s easily removable.

Step 3: Get really hot water (if your tap gets hot enough that great, otherwise you can heat on the stove if needed) and mix with distilled vinegar. You want a combination of one part water to one part vinegar. **Note: you can also run the water and vinegar through your coffee maker to heat it up, AND it will clean your coffee maker. Just make sure that if you have a charcoal filter, you will want to remove that before running your vinegar through it, and then run water cycles until you don’t smell vinegar anymore.

Step 4: Pour the hot water and vinegar mixture over the baking soda so that it goes down the drain while the acid-base reaction takes place. When baking soda and vinegar react with each other, it creates two new chemicals, carbonic acid and sodium acetate. This reaction will help to dissolve build up in your drains, and get rid of those drain smells at the same time!

That’s it. Repeat these steps for all of your drains! Today was a super easy day! Check out my video for drain cleaning below.

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If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments and I would be happy to get back with you.

Check out Day 13. Clean/Polish Kitchen Appliances here.

Check out Day 15. Polishing Household Hardware here.

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