Plumber's snake

Pipe and drain cleaning cable or drain spiral is a tool for cleaning waste pipes without having to unscrew them. The term is misleading, since it technically is not a spiral, but a helical flexible shaft.

Requirement

Theoretically, they could be cleaned with the tool also drinking water pipes; However, she is in these, the pollution problem in practice ( to the leading contaminants in drinking water would not be acceptable ); similar in pipelines in process engineering.

Waste, however, is loaded with fat, feces, and also with waste from sinks or toilets; also performs urine urine stains, deposits that can restrict the flow. Such obstacles typically form in pipe bends. There, they are not accessible without special tools, especially if the pipes are located in a wall.

Accessibility

The spiral is thus, strictly speaking, not a tool, but it brings the actual tool (drill / milling machine ) to the site. By design, they can indeed transmit pressure and rotation, but no transverse forces; the spiral follows the pipe run to the obstacle.

Size

Spirals are available in different dimensions: the most common have 8, 16, 22 and 32 mm in diameter, which are used depending on pipe size and pipe bends. The spirals are 2 or 10 m long and can be extended almost arbitrarily via couplings.

Operation and Tools

Simple spirals (below 5 m) can be manually ( with a knob or a handle ) served; larger versions have electric drives. These tools can also be changed: Drills for fixed, hard blockages, milling for root penetration and spin chains for incrustations on the pipe walls.

The work is - at least when drilling - achieved through a combination of rotation, pressure and hitting. With power tools is often enhanced: The actual spiral is used as a guide tube for a close fitting steel cable. This is advanced machine fits and starts, the tool will then work as a chisel.