Tubs, showers, and hair
Shower & Tub Drain Clogs Denver
Shower, Tub & Drum Trap Clog Removal
You're standing in two inches of water by the end of a shower, or the tub takes an hour to empty after the kids get out. It's hair and soap nearly every time, bound together right where the drain narrows. What varies is how deep it sits and what's under the bathroom floor.
- Getting the stopper out
- Drum traps in old homes
- Why chemicals fail here
- Smells from unused showers
Pull the stopper before you pour anything
A tub doesn't clog the way a kitchen sink does. There's no grease in the equation. What builds up is a wet rope of hair bound together by soap scum, and it forms exactly where the passage narrows: at the strainer, around the crossbars beneath it, and in the first eight inches of the tub shoe. Which is why so many slow tubs clear with nothing more than a bent piece of plastic and a strong stomach.
Get the stopper out of the way first, and which type you have decides the next five minutes. A lift-and-turn unscrews off the post after you back out a tiny setscrew. A toe-touch pops apart once you remove the center screw. A trip-lever tub uses a brass plunger hanging on a linkage inside the overflow tube: pull the two screws on the overflow plate and the whole assembly lifts out, usually wearing a decade of hair like a fur coat.
Then reach in. A barbed plastic hair tool goes down six or eight inches and brings back the answer. If it comes up clean and the tub still holds water, the blockage sits past the trap, and that calls for a cable rather than anything sold on a blister pack.
Old houses hide a drum trap under the bathroom floor
Homes built before roughly 1950 around Denver, Golden, and the older cores of Longmont and Littleton often drain the tub through a drum trap instead of a P-trap. Picture a squat cylinder, cast iron or lead, buried in the floor beside the tub with a screw-on lid that may or may not still be visible under the tile. Water enters low and leaves high, so the thing collects sediment by design.
Drum traps clog with exactly the debris a tub produces, and they are genuinely risky to open. Lids seize after seventy winters, the casting turns brittle, and the wrench that finally breaks it loose can crack the body or twist the lead bend soldered to it. Some plumbers open them as a matter of routine. Others refuse and cable through the overflow instead, precisely because a broken drum trap means opening up a bathroom floor.
Lead is the other prewar surprise. Tub waste arms in bungalows around Baker, Berkeley, and old Englewood were frequently lead, wiped into a cast iron hub. A quarter-inch cable driven by an impatient hand tears straight through soft lead. That is the argument for telling whoever shows up how old the house is before the machine starts turning.
Second-floor tubs raise the stakes again, since the trap and waste sit in a joist bay you can only see from underneath. An access panel behind the tub, or a cut in the ceiling of the room below, becomes the price of admission the moment the job moves past cabling.
What clearing a tub costs, and where a snake does damage
Most slow tubs are a modest visit: pull the waste assembly, clear the shoe and the trap, run water, done. That kind of call commonly lands in the low hundreds on this corridor. It climbs when the line has to be cabled from a roof vent, when corroded stopper hardware has to be cut out of the tub shoe, or when a drum trap turns a cleaning into a repair.
Two situations change the math completely. If water rises in the tub when you flush a toilet or the washer drains, the tub isn't clogged at all: it's the lowest opening on a main line that's backing up, and the answer lives in the sewer line rather than your bathroom. And if the shower pan itself weeps around the drain body, no amount of clearing helps, because that's pan work with tile attached to it.
Skip the crystal drain openers here in particular. In a tub they sit against chrome, rubber, and plastic for hours, and the varieties that generate heat can soften an ABS trap or loosen a glued drain body. Enzyme products are gentler and slow, and none of them dissolve a hair rope anyway. In a bathroom the mechanical answer is the real answer, every single time.
| Stopper type | How it releases | What is hiding under it |
|---|---|---|
| Lift-and-turn | Back out the small setscrew, unscrew from the post | Hair wound tight around the crossbars |
| Toe-touch, foot actuated | Pop the cap, remove the center screw | A spring cartridge packed with scum |
| Trip lever with brass plunger | Two screws on the overflow plate, lift the linkage | Sediment in the overflow tube and shoe |
| Push-pull or drop-in insert | Pulls straight out by hand | A clear shot at the tub shoe with a hair tool |
Need this handled this week?
Start a quoteThe guest shower that smells is not clogged
A spare bathroom that smells like sewer after two weeks of nobody using it is almost never blocked. It's evaporated. Every shower drain holds a few inches of water in its trap as a gas barrier, and in Colorado's dry air, especially in January when the furnace runs and indoor humidity falls into the teens, that seal disappears faster than people expect.
Run water in every unused shower and basement floor drain once a month. If a bathroom sits idle for a whole season, pour in a cup of water and follow it with a tablespoon of mineral oil, which floats on top and slows evaporation to a crawl. Old trick, still works, costs nothing.
Prevention is the boring part that saves the money. Brush hair before showering rather than in it, keep a real strainer in the drain, and once a season pull the waste assembly and clean the linkage. Houses on hard groundwater north and east of the city have it worse, since soap scum sets up more like plaster than film. Denver Water's soft mountain supply is one of the few genuine plumbing advantages of living in town, and it still will not dissolve hair. Nothing will.
Related work
More drains services
Clogged Sink Repair
kitchen and bathroom sink blockages, P-trap work, disposal-side clogs
→Clogged Toilet Repair
toilet blockages, running toilets, flange and wax ring failures, replacement
→Garbage Disposal Repair
jammed or humming units, leaks at the flange, replacement sizing
→Hydro Jetting
high-pressure line scouring, grease mains, when jetting beats cabling
→Floor Drain Backups
basement floor drains, laundry standpipes, backwater valves
→Where we cover
Front Range cities we write for
Questions we actually get
Shower & Tub Drain Clogs: quick answers
Will boiling water clear a slow tub?
It buys a few days at best. Boiling water softens soap film but does nothing at all to a hair rope, and poured into a PVC or ABS trap it can stress the joints over time. Pull the stopper and the waste assembly first, because that is where the blockage sits in the large majority of slow tubs.
How do I know if my house has a drum trap?
Age is the first clue: many homes built before about 1950 in the older cores of Denver, Longmont, and Littleton have one. Look for a round metal lid, maybe six inches across, set in the floor beside the tub or visible in the ceiling below. If the bathroom has been remodeled, that lid may be tiled over, and only a camera or the original layout tells you for certain.
The shower drains fine but the tub beside it is slow. Same clog?
Probably not. Each fixture has its own trap and its own short arm out to the branch, so a slow tub next to a healthy shower points at the tub's own waste assembly, usually a trip lever linkage packed solid with hair. If both slowed down together, and especially if the toilet gurgles, then the shared branch or the vent is involved.
Standing in the shower water?
Tell us the age of the house and which stopper you have, and the request goes out with the right details attached.
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