If you’ve got long hair, then an unsightly, hairy plughole is unavoidable. We’ve all experienced the sinking feeling of standing, ankle deep in water, in a slow-draining shower as a clump of hair gathers around the plughole, inevitably blocking it.
The experts estimate that women naturally lose between 50-100 strands per day – that’s a lot of hair, although given the average human head has between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs on it, losing a few tresses is not going to make too much difference to your bouncy locks, but it will cause a problem in your plughole.
The simplest way of dealing with hair near the opening of your plughole is to fish it out with your fingers or a pair of tweezers – not the most pleasant job but fairly straightforward. If it is stuck a bit further down the plughole you could use a piece of wire that has been bent to create a hook-shape, or even a coat hanger fashioned in a similar way.
But hair that is stuck further down the pipe, and has maybe become tangled with old soap bits and other grime, will prove more difficult to shift.
One approach could be to use a plunger, which you move up and down slowly to build up suction, to remove the blockage. If that fails, another potential DIY tool is a drain auger – a coil of wire around a drum that can be pushed down waste pipes and then manipulated to shift hair.
Homemade remedies include emptying a tube of leg hair removal cream down the plughole and leaving it overnight to disintegrate the hair before flushing it through.
A sure-fire chemical solution is Buster’s own Bathroom Plughole Unblocker, which has been designed specifically to quickly dissolve hair and soap scum lurking in your pipes.
But we recommend you don’t just wait for a blockage to accumulate before using Bathroom Plughole Unblocker. Rather, apply it regularly as part of your house clean to ensure that slow draining water and blockages caused by hair will be a thing of the past.