Your floor drain
Have you ever tried baking soda and vinegar down the floor drain. You might be surprised at what it does. There should be a clean out plug in the side of the floor drain. You could try a great big box of baking soda and three or four gallons of vinegar. Pour a third or half box of soda down the drain, then pour a half or a gallon of vinegar down on top of it. Keep pouring baking soda in the drain and washing it down with vinegar. Keep an eye on near by drains. You might have boil ups. You can also pour large amounts of Mortons canning salt down the drain with the vinegar and soda. Keep pouring those ingredients down the drain until you fill up the main line under the floor with the boiling foam you'll make with the soda and vinegar. Let it sit for quite a while. The boiling action and the acid from the vinegar combined with the salt moving around in the line might clear the sides of the line and make it drain more freely. After it's sits for awhile and the boiling stops, listen down the hole to see if you can hear the hissing of the vinegar and soda any more. After thirty minutes or so, flush the drain with gallons and gallons of very hot water. If your water heater isn't very old or you have drained the sediment out of the bottom of it on a regular basis, like you should, you can probably trust it enough to hook a garden hose up to it and turn it on full blast, to rinse down the drain. If you haven't, draining the water heater from the bottom will disturb the sediment, and it could start to leak or the bottom could fall out of it all together. I've had this happen to me before. Then you have to be prepared to replace it. Other wise, you could fill the washing machine up with hot water and stick the drain hose down the floor drain, pack some towels or something around it and hold it in place, then pump the water out of the machine and that would give it a pretty good blast. If you do this, be sure to run water down drains that have a direct connection to the main line that you're cleaning. That way, if any vinegar or residue from your cleaning has backed up in any of the other drains, it will get washed down. Flush all the toilets too, to wash the vinegar down the main sewer line. It's corrosive and will eat into metal if left in place(not as bad as draino though). You can try this with the floor drain clean out plug in or out. Try it both ways. If you fill the drain up with soda and vinegar enough, it will go down both ways. With the plug in, you'll clean the trap in the floor. With it out, it heads toward the main line, bypassing the trap. If the floor drain is iron, the plug could be rusted shut and will be hard to get off. I think they make a special tool to get those off. If your drain is slow because of sedimentation, this method will probably help. If its from another reason, it may not. For instance, a broken line under the concrete, not enough drop in the line, or a foreign object in the line. Only a plumber can tell this by passing a camera on a fiber optic line down the drain. They can film it too, for future reference. They can also tell where the problems is by measuring the amount of cable that has been fed down the line. Forgot to tell you earlier, you can get big boxes of Arm&Hammer baking soda at discount warehouse stores, if you want to try this. Look for generic vinegar too. Cheaper. Hope this helps.
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(Charlotte, NC) 
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