The Kitchen Sink Drain Leak Fiasco
So my idea for starting this website was to focus on untangling tangled wires, zip-typing them and maybe even attaching little cool labels to attach to them and such.
And believe me, I will get back to that soon.
But seeing how today, I haven’t been working on sorting, organizing and binding up wires, but instead, spent part of my morning working on fixing a leak in the plumbing, well, just seemed apropos to diverge from “wires” to “plumbing” for a moment instead.
👎 Attempted Fix #1 (The “Flex Hose” Approach)
See that “flex hose” connected to the P-Trap - the “U” or “J” shaped piece above? Seems that’s not the best way to run a drain line from a garbage disposal back to the main drain outlet there in the back.
- Seems “gunk” like grease, soap and God only knows what can build up inside of that “accordion” shaped, bendable pipe that runs from the P-Trap to the Garbage Disposal drain line.
- Over time, the flex hose seems to put undo pressure where it connects to the P-Trap eventually causing it to eventually drip. And no matter how many times I attempted to re-align and hand-tighten (recommended) the flex hose to the P-Trap, the drip only got worse over time.
👎 Attempted Fix #2 (The “Over-Engineered” Approach)
As you might be thinking to yourself at this point, the “flex hose” approach was more of a “I didn’t feel like doing the extra work to do it right the first time” solution” (or, lack thereof).
So I headed to the local Home Depot last week and spent a good amount of time coming up with this monstrosity of engineering madness (see above) converting one size pipe and various connectors, “reducers”, and expanders connected in part by plumbing cement.
Problem is, it also leaked. That “P-Trap” connection just didn’t want to seal, and no matter where I looked in Home Depot, I could not find a compression ring near the size to “fix it” from leaking.
👍 Resolved Fix #3 (The “Simpler and More Straight-Forward” Approach)
Rather than wasting time fixing the way the piping was done before - which, admittedly, I screwed up on, I replaced the whole works with what you see above.
To be a bit more specific, my son and I replaced out this entire section (two pictures up) between the main drain pipe (leading into the wall) and the corner piece attaching to the garbage disposal drain (the black pipe attached to the garbage disposal).
In Summary
Much simpler design. Much less prone to leakage. Less likely to fail (hopefully never) over time.
Thought to Consider
Cause’ isn’t life like that sometimes? Somedays we just want to take the “easy way out” and take shortcuts to save us time, energy, focus, etc.
Other days we can spin ourselves around in circles trying to come up with some fanciful way of solving X problem, when in reality, if we’d just taken a step back, rested, and then revisited, we’d realize that in the end, in almost all cases, “simple is better”, and quite often, “Simple is best!”