get yourself a tub shroom
Every six months or so for the past few years our tub or sink would show the first signs of a clog: the water draining just a tiny bit more slowly, nearly imperceptible at first, enough to lie to yourself about whether it was happening.
Soon after it would be clear that it was happening, but equally clear that that fact could yet be ignored for some time yet. A shower would finish with an inch or two of water, but that was manageable, a bit fun even to slosh around in, and it would drain well before the next use.
There are at least two kinds of cutoffs with tub drains: the soft and the hard. The soft cutoff is when the water line reaches the shower curtain. The hard cutoff is much further down the road, when the water line reaches the top of the tub. We are a civilized family and operate under the soft cutoff. And at some point the fill rate would exceed the drain rate such that even a relatively short shower would exceed it. We are also a full-haired family, and while there was plenty of time for postponement, the threshold where it could no longer be ignored would approach at its pace.
This would inevitably mean an unpleasant evening or late night for me, fumbling with the snake, trying to remember the trick to it that I had figured out last time about getting it around the insane invisible ancient bends in the cast iron beneath the floor. The reward for remembering or relearning was a mass of phlegmy hair plucked from the depths and bound together by a whitish glue comprising decaying shampoo, conditioner, epsom salts, and sundry bodily excretions. I have no tolerance for fluids like this. It was all I could do to keep from retching. When my wife and I started childrenizing we agreed that I would handle blood and she, vomit. In my opinion this is closer to the latter but fell under an unwritten plumbing exception.
After putting up with this for years, I was hit by the kind of stroke of genius that family members, friends, and neighbors all say is characteristic of me: what if I kept the hair from getting in the drain in the first place?
It was immediately clear that there must be some kind of “strainer”, and a quick search at the world’s best hardware store, Ace Hardware, and in particular, the branch in Waverly, turned up the tub shroom.
The stamp of approval from Cosmopolitan was all I needed to know I was looking at the right product.
I bought one for our tub and also our sink and since then have had the pleasure of clearing it out on a semi-weekly basis. It’s still pretty disgusting, but it turns out that a fresh knot of greasy hair is roughly an order of magnitude more tolerable than a rotting one. And crucially, it is below threshold for triggering my gag reflex.
It’s been nine months or so and I have not once had to break the snake out from its location under the basement sink. All that’s remaining is to get the kids to start clearing the shroom themselves.
Anyway, A+ product, highly recommend.