For a good couple of weeks now – I honestly don’t remember how long – our AC drain has been backed up to the point where it’s been dumping water out all over the floor of our garage.

Well, first it goes into the drip pan, and then it overflows into the bucket we placed under it last time this happened … because I guess the shut-off value doesn’t actually work? And then it overflows from the bucket all over the floor where I step in it and almost fall on by back trying to refill the water cooler at one in the morning!

Anywho, in the past I’ve paid an AC repairman on more than one occasion to basically come out and empty the drain pan and then clean out the pipe with a wet-dry vac, so being that for whatever reason I now own one of my own … and not having a landlord to slough the repair bill off on … I decided to try and fix this one myself.

😯

The first try was fairly unproductive, I think mostly because I just wasn’t patient enough to let the vacuum do its thing. Probably because at least one of the times I called a guy out, it ended up being a frog stuck in the drain pipe, which came out in like ten seconds!

After my first attempt failed, however, I watched a couple of YouTube videos wondering if I needed some sort of fancy plumbing snake or something, and I learned that more often than not it’s actually algae and not frogs that gets clogged in the line, and that I just needed to let it suck longer to breakdown all of the algae gunk stuck up inside of there…

So that I did – hooked up my vac and let it do its thing while I stared at the garage hoping that it would somehow miraculously clean itself, and sure enough a good five minutes later I walked over to the AC unit and could hear actual airflow coming through the drain instead of just finding a bunch of backed up water! I then turned the vacuum off and dumped it all over the driveway to reveal a lot of water and a bunch of yucky algae and sand and stuff that had been clogging it … which I immediately regretted dumping in the middle of my driveway.

BUT STILL – I managed to save myself an $80 service call and I no longer have to worry about stepping in puddles when I step out into the garage … until the next time that it happens again … but at least now I know how to suck that sucker clean all by myself! 😉