Finds: Drain Cleaner
By Sean O'Hara
Forget Drano – use a power tool! Think of Milwaukee’s drain cleaner as your father’s hand-fed drain snake after a visit from Tim Taylor (”grunt, grunt, grunt”). It’s a 450 RPM drain rooting machine.
The drain cleaner’s business end is a coil that roots out drain clogs in up to 2″ waste lines. The front drum holds up to 35′ of 3/8″ (or 50′ of 5/16″) inner-core cable, so you’ve got plenty of reach down the clogged line. The unit’s power plant is a standard corded Milwaukee reversible drill motor, delivering corkscrewing action to the coil.
Street pricing starts at $235. It’s probably overkill for everyday use around kitchen sink clogs, but then again if you could save one visit from the plumber, you’d probably break even. And if the Drano didn’t work, putting one of these down the drain and pulling the trigger would at least make you feel better.
Drain Cleaner [Milwaukee]
Street Pricing [Froogle]
Update: Astute reader James says he’s found numerous attachments for a standard drill to turn it into a cleaner — starting at just $9 or so. Froogle’s your friend.
December 17th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
If you don’t want to spend $235 you can get drain cleaner attachments for your regular drill. A quick Froogle search turned up a bunch of attachments costing $9 to $90.
December 18th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
Whatever you do, don’t get the $9 attachments. I bought a lower-end Sears drain cleaner attachment and it’s broken on me three times. They have plastic components that undergo a lot of stress, and almost always break. I doubt any of the really cheap ones are much better.
We ended up buying a $100+ one for the office and it’s a LOT better.
The drill-included one seems like overkill for a house, though!
December 18th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
[...] It seems that our drain cleaner find has reminded a number of readers about some cool tools they use to solve plumbing issues. For example, Eli writes: “If you’ve got a small racecar, a hair comb, an apple core wrapped in toilet paper, or a massive poo trapped in the bowl of your toilet (as opposed to the drain line, where you could go through a cleanout or the vent with a conventional or powered snake) then you need an auger. In fact, if you have kids, go get one right now because you’ll need it eventually. [...]
December 18th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Is it just me, or does having an electric motor stuck to the thing preclude you from dunking it in a vinegar-and-bleach solution when you’re done? I have the hand-cranked version, and I could see using one that chucks into a separate drill, but with a built-in motor, I think it becomes a liability rather than an asset.