Beware of Brown Friday: Plumbers’ Busiest Day of the Year

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While throngs of shoppers descend on stores everywhere in pursuit of the best sales this Black Friday, hordes of plumbers will be dispatched across the nation to deal with the ugly aftermath of those gut-busting Thanksgiving feasts: clogged disposals, pipes, and toilets.

Welcome to Brown Friday, the busiest day of the year for plumbers.

“With everybody having guests and family in town, the plumbing system is under more demand,” says Beau Means, operations manager at Benjamin Franklin Plumbers in Wichita, KS. “It can become overloaded.”

The day after Thanksgiving is twice as busy as any other day of the year—even more so than Hanukkah and Christmas, he says.

“The meal preparation tends to cause clogs in the kitchen sinks and disposals,” says Paul Abrams, spokesman for Roto-Rooter, a plumbing and drain company with more than 600 locations in the U.S. and Canada. “When you have a house full of guests, they tend to flush toilets more often. They’re taking more showers, and it may lead to extra laundry loads.”

The top problem the company sees are backed-up kitchen sinks and disposals overflowing with turkey bones, vegetable peelings, and just about anything else that went into the Thanksgiving dinner.

That’s followed by blocked sewer lines (which include all household wastewater) and then toilets that won’t flush. (Thank Uncle Pete, who ate the last helping of baked beans, for that last one.)

Tips for keeping drains, disposals, and toilets unclogged

• Ask guests to space out their showers by about 10 to 15 minutes so the drains have an “opportunity to do their job,” says Abrams.
• Scrape leftover food from plates, pots, and pans into the trash—instead of the kitchen disposal. It’s key to keep turkey bones and other trash out of the kitchen disposals so they don’t clog up them up.
• Make sure the disposal is running when scraps are thrown down it.
• Never pour grease, oils, or fats down the drain, as they could solidify and block it up.
• Avoid flushing cotton balls and wet wipes down the toilet, as those could clog up the toilet and cause it to overflow.
• Put a wastebasket and a toilet plunger in all guest bathrooms. “Nobody wants to make the walk of shame if they clog your toilet,” Abrams says.

If these tips fail and something does go wrong, folks shouldn’t hesitate to call a plumber. Many don’t charge extra over the holidays—although it may take a little longer for them to pry themselves away from their own Thanksgiving feasts to reach their destinations.

“It can’t hurt to call and ask,” Abrams says.

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