The scorching Perth summer arrives with its own drainage weather. Kitchens produce BBQ quantities of grease, households swell with guests, water use peaks everywhere, and beneath the lawn, tree roots respond to the drying ground by hunting moisture harder than any other season, with the local sewer as the most reliable water source on the block. It is no coincidence that the holiday period is our busiest emergency season. The good news is that summer drainage trouble follows patterns, and patterns can be beaten. Here is how to keep everything flowing until autumn.
Summer is root season, act like it
The defining summer pressure is invisible. As surface moisture disappears, roots drive toward the sewer, entering through joints and cracks in older pipes and thickening into the nets that catch everything. The behavioural signs escalate through the season, gurgling after flushing, multiple fixtures slowing together, odours at the external gully, and a patch of lawn staying green while everything browns. Any of those signs in December deserve action rather than observation, because a root mass in early summer is a jetting job, while the same mass in late January, with a house full of guests, is a Boxing Day emergency. If your property has root history, a pre season camera and clear is the cheapest insurance of the year, and sealing the entry points by relining retires the problem permanently.
The BBQ grease problem
Summer cooking is glorious and greasy, and the kitchen line pays for it. Meat fats, marinades and oily trays multiply the load heading for the sink, and the classic summer mistake compounds it, tipping BBQ fat down the drain with hot water in pursuit, which merely sets the grease deeper into the line. The summer discipline is simple, fat and drippings cool in a can or jar and go to the bin, plates and grills get scraped before rinsing, and the sink keeps its mesh strainer through the season of corn cobs and salad scraps. Finish hosting weekends with a hot tap flush, and the kitchen line survives the festivities untouched.
Guests multiply everything
A holiday house full of family is a load test, more showers pushing hair and sunscreen at the bathroom wastes, more flushes, and guests who do not know your house rules about what goes down what. Prepare like a good host, strainers in every bathroom waste, a bin visible beside every toilet, which silently prevents the wipes and hygiene products that cause holiday blockages, and any known slow fixture fixed before the arrivals rather than apologised for after. If the household runs on one bathroom, treat its drains to a preventative clean before the season, the December version of that job costs less than the Christmas Day version by a wide margin.
Sunscreen, sand and the beach season extras
Perth summer adds its own ingredients. Sunscreen and thick moisturisers are grease as far as your bathroom wastes are concerned, binding with hair exactly as soap scum does, so a quick rinse of heavily creamed skin at an outside tap before the shower spares the drain the worst of it. Beach sand is the other summer migrant, riding home in bathers and toys and settling in traps and low points where it behaves like the sediment it is. Shake and rinse the sand outdoors, and keep it from the shower waste where a summer of accumulation genuinely tells.
Watch the water pressure of the season
Peak summer demand can also reveal marginal plumbing above ground, showers weakening at busy hours as retic and taps run together, and fixtures that hammer or shudder under heavy simultaneous use. These are worth noting rather than shrugging at, because pressure and flow complaints that appear only under summer load are the early edition of complaints that will eventually appear always, and diagnosing them in the quiet of autumn is easier than mid crisis.
The summer promise
Drains ask little to survive a Perth summer, keep the fat and sand out, strain the hair, mind the bins, flush hot after the big weekends, and answer the early gurgles with action. Do that and the season’s drama stays at the cricket where it belongs. And if summer finds a weakness anyway, or the roots got a season’s head start before you read this, we are on call right through the holidays, 24 hours, jetting and cameras aboard, because summer emergencies do not respect the public holidays either. Drains Plus has kept Perth flowing through 25 summers, and if we cannot clear your drain, it is free.
Outdoor entertaining adds one more drain to the list people forget, the external ones. Hose down the alfresco area toward a grate blocked with a season of leaves and the water finds the house instead, so give outdoor grates and gullies a clear out at the start of summer, and keep the pool backwash and top up arrangements in mind if you have one. Summer storms are rare but not mythical, and the one that arrives during a January barbecue will find every blocked grate on the property in about four minutes.
