Best drain snake and toilet auger

How to choose

Match the tool to the clog

For a toilet, use a toilet auger: a short cable, usually 3 or 6 feet, with a protective sleeve.^{7 13} One DIY forum answer warns that a sink snake can scratch the bowl and twist inside the wider drain.¹⁴

For a sink or tub clog past the trap, get a 25-foot cable 1/4 to 5/16 inch thick, and check your pipe size against the tool's limit.^{1 4} You can also take a sink's trap off, or go into a tub through the overflow, which is a straighter run than the drain.^{15 16}

How many you need

One toilet auger and one 25-foot hand snake cover most homes, though Bob Vila says a multistory home may need 50 feet of cable.⁴ You probably don't need battery power unless you clear drains often or cranking is hard on your arms. A spinning cable also raises the stakes for your hands.^{4 17 18}

Protect your hands and eyes

CPSC's injury reports from emergency rooms show what can go wrong. Fingers and hands come up again and again, with cuts, fractures and some amputations. Gloves have caught in the cable, and cables have come back out of drains with force, including one tip that struck a man in the eye. These reports show the kinds of injuries that happen, not how often they happen. Nobody knows how many people use these tools, so the reports give no injury rate.^{17 18 19 20 21}

Wear safety glasses and leather work gloves, and keep your hands off the spinning cable. Never wear cloth or rubber gloves on their own, and don't use a rag, because they can wrap around the cable or catch in the coils. General Pipe Cleaners allows only leather, and Ridgid allows latex or rubber only under leather, so follow your tool's manual.^{1 2 22}

Hold the tool within 4 inches of the drain or support the cable. Never force it, and replace a worn or damaged cable.^{1 6} Pull the cable out only when it has stopped turning.² Keep other people back, because CPSC's reports include helpers hurt by a cable or auger that came back out.^{17 19} Wash with soap and water right after the job.²³

Never snake a drain that holds chemicals

If someone has poured in drain cleaner, don't snake or plunge. Call a plumber and say what went in.^{1 2} CPSC's reports include burns during snaking. In one, a mix of two drain openers came back on a man's face, arms and legs despite his goggles.^{19 20}

This is also the best reason to own a snake. In calls to poison centers about eye exposures, drain cleaners had the largest share of major medical outcomes of any cleaning product type, at 1.4%.²⁴ Records for children under 6 also rank them among the more harmful cleaners.²⁵ A mechanical tool lets you leave them out of your house.

Know when to call a plumber

A cable only pokes through kitchen grease, so a grease clog that keeps coming back needs a water jetter.²² If water from one fixture comes up through another, the blockage may be farther than these tools reach.^{3 26} Problems in a main line or washing machine drain may need a cable about 1/2 inch thick and up to 75 feet long.⁴ Those are heavy machines, and CPSC's reports include amputations involving them. Don't rent one without experience.^{18 20}