Bathroom “bad habits” are any everyday bathroom behaviors that place your bathroom’s plumbing under undue strain. Almost everyone has one of these bad habits. In fact, you might not even realize they’re bad habits at all! Here are the most common bathroom bad habits and how you can break them: 

1. Flushing feminine hygiene products.

Feminine hygiene products were made to absorb water, so don’t break down easily. When you flush them down your toilet, there’s a good chance they’ll expand and catch in your pipes.

Feminine hygiene products cause bad plumbing clogs all the time. Instead of flushing your feminine hygiene products, wrap them in paper towels or toilet paper and throw them away. Your pipes will thank you.

2. Flushing hair down the shower drain.

This one sounds like it’s impossible to avoid, right? After all, hair is unavoidable! It grows constantly, and most people have quite a lot of it. Some hair is naturally going to fall off in the shower, that much really is unavoidable. What you can avoid, however, is letting that hair fall into your shower drain. 

Hair in your drain will slow down your pipes, create nasty clogs, and cause all kinds of other issues. It’s also easy to avoid! Just install a simple drain catcher over your shower’s drain. Drain catches keep hair and other potential clog-starters from sliding into your pipes. When it doesn’t enter your pipes, it doesn’t clog your drains. 

3. Using chemical drain cleaners.

Chemical drain cleaners should be a no-go no matter what. Yes, they eat through clogs, but they also eat through your pipes. Over time, the damage chemical drain cleaners inflict can lead to leaks and even completely burst pipes. Solving a short term problem is never worth creating a much more serious problem further down the road. Never use chemical drain cleaners.

Instead of chemicals, we recommend plunger’s, plumbing snakes, or professional cleaning. Mechanical measures like snakes and hydro-jetting can clear away dirty pipes without hurting them. We can remove even serious blockages without creating new problems in the process. Cleaning is safer, more effective, and cheaper in the long run. 

4. Not using your ventilation system.

As you run water for baths or showers, a lot of moisture naturally builds up in your bathroom. If you don’t ventilate your bathroom properly, all that moisture just… sticks around. Over time, it seeps into the walls and floors and even fosters mold growth. Yuck! 

You should always turn on your bathroom fan when you’re showering or bathing. The fan will suck excess moisture out of the bathroom to prevent it from building up. You should also dry off the inside of your shower after every use. Never leave bundled up linens or towels sitting around, either. The more you can do to prevent moisture accumulation in your bathroom, the more effectively you’ll prevent mold.

5. You don’t use the right plunger for the job.

Did you know that different types of plungers are good at different types of job? There are two common varieties of plungers you would use in your bathroom: cup plungers and flange plungers. 

Cup plungers are probably what you picture when you think of a plunger. They usually have wooden handles, red or black plastic “cup” plunger heads, and no “flange.” Cup plungers fit over sink drains very effectively, but can’t deal with toilet drains very well. 

Flange plungers, on the other hand, are usually black plastic. They have an extra rubber flap, or “flange,” that helps create a seal on curved surfaces. The flange makes flange plungers very effective at plunging toilets, but far less effective at plunging sinks. To summarize: you should use cup plungers for sinks and tabs, and flange plungers for toilets.

If you use one of these plungers for the other plunger’s job, you’ll probably find it doesn’t work very well. Even worse, the process of attempting to plunge with the wrong plunger might damage something–especially if you get frustrated with the lack of results your plunger produces and begin to… “plunge angry.” Keep both a cup plunger and a flange plunger on-hand in your bathroom. When your sink clogs, use the cup; when your toilet clogs, use the flange! 

Don’t feel bad if you find out you have one or more of these bad habits. Most people do! The important thing is recognizing the bad habits and taking the steps to change them. By looking up these bad habit breaking tips, you’ve already taken the first step. Now you just have to implement them!

You shouldn’t feel bad if your bad habits have… inflicted some damage before you could fix them, either. Instead, just give Ben Franklin Plumbing a call today. We promise quick, effective, lecture and judgment-free plumbing you can count on! Whatever your bad habit, we’ve seen it before–and fixed it before.