Vorsprung durch Technik

I drive German, but not an Audi. Mine is another finely engineered German make. You can’t beat German technology. They engineer everything to perfection, like the Japanese. If it’s German, it’s not just good, it is excellent. It’s in their DNA, I think.

Today’s task required some of that precision engineering. The outside drain which takes water from the kitchen developed a blockage somewhere. It started flowing away slowly about a week ago and I put it down to all the rain we’ve seen over the past few weeks. And then on Friday, it just choked up and stopped almost completely, taking about 14 hours to recede. Not good.

I’ve always been wary of those extendable flexible pipes plumbers use to unclog drains. All the plumbers I’ve met have all chuckled about how many they’ve lost down the drain because the joints snap, etc. Apparently, proper plumbers use a single long pipe with no joints but those are expensive and hard to come by, again, apparently.

Anyway, on Saturday I tried a little hack which failed miserably. I have some thin copper tubing (quite long) and thought to give it go with the old jab-and-prod technique, like the plumbers do. Copper is nice and flexible at that thickness so it sort-of worked up to a point; the water started moving again but not by very much. When I woke up this morning, the water was still standing, having barely dropped more than a few centimetres.

Time for some German tech. Off to Screwfix I went, and picked up a Karcher Pipe Cleaning Kit, the flexible hose one. It is expensive AF, but it’s German! 15 metres set me back almost £80. A bargain?? Let’s see, I thought. [Aside] Screwfix’s price is much cheaper than Amazon’s.

I got back home, waited for the (more) rain to stop, connected it up, took a deep breath and wondered how long this was going to take. There goes my restful Sunday…

I fed the line into the drain as far as it could go and gave it a burst for about 5 seconds. Stopped. Bubbles, lots of bubbles. I pulled it out a bit and this time when I fed the line, it went deeper. Cool. I pumped for about another 5-10 seconds, pull / push / pump. Whooooossshhhh! Gurgle! Gone!

Less than 60 seconds. I almost felt ripped-off given the price I paid for this thing!

Wow! That was fast and efficient, and so much cheaper than calling out a plumber.

Vorsprung durch Deutsche Technik!

[Another aside] Don’t know if that’s correct German but it sounds good to me!