My wife & I are quite the “Do It Yourselfers”.  We take pride in the fact that we remodeled out last home and made some money doing it too!  Plumbing, light electrical, carpentry, design, landscaping, you name it we did it.

This weekend the garbage disposal decided it was gonna be a garbage parking lot.  A round of cleaning out the fridge put too much of the wrong stuff down the drain and there is sat.  Time for me to do the plumbing thing again.

While I go gather the tools, my wife cleans out everything from under the sink.  (Boy, is there a lot of stuff down there!)  So off comes the P-trap, plop into the bucket goes the guck.  (Guck – a plumbing technical term.)  But the water is still standing in the sink.  Normally, I just keep taking pipes out of the system until the rest o the guck plops into the bucket.  My wife asks why don’t I just use the plunger to push it all out.  *DING* great idea!

If you have a dishwasher heed my advise.  Don’t listen to those Dings!  There is a back flow vent on your sink.  That little silver thing that sticks up on the right hand side – you know what I’m talking about.  Well that little vent is there to relieve pressure in the plumbing system.  When you apply pressure, say the manly umph of a plunger to a plugged drain, that little relief vent swings into action.  By “swings in to action” I mean, it takes the sudden rush of water and redirects that water up through the vent slots under the silver cover.  Actually the silver cover become a small projectile riding a jet powered stream of water and guck.  The silver cover stays close to the sink.  The water and guck on the other hand. goes pretty much everywhere in the kitchen, the breakfast nook, under the cabinets, if it was in line of sight, it got a coating.

What the heck, it was time to do a good deep cleaning anyway . . . . . . . . . . . . .