Picked up a 15 dollar snake at a garage sale and it saved me a plumbing call

Found this old drain snake at a garage sale in Omaha for 15 bucks, just a basic manual one with a rusty handle. Last week my downstairs tenant's tub was backing up and she said it was getting real gross. I spent maybe 20 minutes snaking it and pulled out this clump of hair and gunk the size of a small fist. That thing probably saved me 200 dollars on a plumber. Has anyone else had luck with cheap secondhand tools for fixing stuff?

3 comments

3 Comments

park.robin4d agoMost Upvoted

Gotta add something nobody's bringing up yet - those old manual snakes are actually way better for delicate pipes than the electric ones plumbers use. I used an electric auger once on a friend's place and it chewed right through an old cast iron elbow that was already weak. Cost him way more to fix that than the original clog. A manual snake lets you feel what you're doing, you can tell when you're pushing against a clog versus pushing against pipe wall. Plus those cheap garage sale finds usually have that nice spring steel that flexes but doesn't kink up like the modern coated cables do. Plumbers push electric machines because they're faster for them, not because they're better for your pipes.

uma6855d ago

That "clump of hair and gunk" line made me laugh because I found a vintage cast iron pipe wrench at a flea market for 8 bucks and used it to free a stuck toilet flange bolt last summer. Cheap old tools are usually better made than the new junk anyway.

kevin_dixon5d ago

That "cheap old tools are usually better made than the new junk" is EXACTLY right. I had a similar thing happen with a seized sink trap last year, I found an old rigid pipe wrench at a garage sale for five bucks. The thing felt like it weighed ten pounds but it had that nice toothed grip that actually bit into the pipe without slipping. New pipe wrenches from the big box stores feel like toys compared to that thing, they've got these skinny handles and teeth that just slide around. I ended up using it to break loose a shower drain that a plumber told me would need to be cut out, so that five dollar wrench saved me a couple hundred bucks easy.