Removing step or push drain stop from shower

We have this shower drain stop where you step on it, it clicks down, and then the water stops. You step on it again to release it. Super fancy, but I want to take it out and put in little strainer nets to catch all the hair from my wife and daughters. The drain keeps clogging on a very regular basis and we're going through Drano like crazy.

After I unscrew the top cap and remove the O-ring, I get what's pictured below. There's a brass center piece with a slit. The diameter of the white plastic collar around the brass piece is right around 1 inch. The brass piece itself is about 3/4 in in diameter. I don't have a flathead screwdriver that wide, and my attempts with the biggest flathead I do have didn't do anything but scuff and damage the slit.

I've also tried tapping on the screwdriver with a hammer to see if that would loosen it up. It did not, but I also didn't hit it extremely hard. I didn't want to damage my piping.

Anyone familiar with these types of stops and know how I can remove it?


Shower drain stop with cap and O-ring removed.

 

That looks like a Danco step on stopper. The whole white plastic part unscrews (counter clockwise). Once it is removed, you'll be left with a threaded hole in a cross arm underneath. You can get a perforated screen that covers the drain and is held on with a screw into that threaded hole.

Tip: skip the draino and get yourself one of those flat flexible strips with the little barbs on it; they work great for pulling hair clogs out of bathtubs.

 

Awesome, thank you!

 

To clarify, do you mean to unscrew the brass piece in the middle? Because it's not budging.

Or did you mean to unscrew just the white collar around the center brass piece? I'm trying that, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything.

 

The white collar. Here's a link to the Danco part which looks similar to yours: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Danco-Chrom...E&gclsrc=aw.ds

If you look at the 4th or 5th pic you will see how it gets mounted.

 

Sorry for the delayed reply, it took a while to figure this out. The piece inside the drain was stuck solid, probably from years of mineralized water flowing past it. The white collar did turn, but no matter how much we turned it, everything stayed solidly locked to the drain. I also tried using penetrating oil on it, but because the threaded portion that screws into the drain cross-arms is smaller in diameter than everything on top of it, there was no way to really spray the penetrating oil on it directly. I soaked everything in the penetrating oil in hopes that it would trickle down and get onto the threads, but my guess is that it didn't happen.

In case anyone else in the future is facing the same problem, here is the solution that a friend and I ultimately came up with. You will need safety glasses, channel locks, optionally a flathead screwdriver.

1. Wear the safety glasses.
2. Use channel locks to squeeze the white collar until it breaks. It will explode into many little pieces, and you'll be happy you wore your safety glasses.
3. Use the channel locks to grab onto the center brass piece, which is now accessible with the white collar mostly gone, and start loosening. Switch to the screw driver if you want, or just keep going with the channel locks until it is out.

In my case, I found a lot of hair suspended between the center piece and the drain. No wonder we were constantly clogging up. The Drano probably wasn't able to eat away at the hair properly, either, since it wasn't at the bottom of the p-trap. Yet, because of how much space the step on takes up, you don't see that you have all this hair between the step on and the drain walls.

I personally would not recommend using these step on drain stoppers. They look fancy, but they aren't worth the maintenance headaches, and they are impossible to remove unless you are willing to break them due to the threads seizing up after being exposed to years of water minerals. Ideally, you shouldn't have to destroy things to remove them.

 

Good work sorting it out! I've found the same thing with the step on plugs; they clog too easily, and even if you remove them regularly so they don't get frozen like yours was, they still get gross and are hard to clean.