As for clearing clogged drains: I grew up in a 3 family house which my father owned. We did as much of the work as we could for maintenance or repair by ourselves. Dad had worked for his brother-in-law back, a licensed master plumber in Brooklyn, NY, back in the 1930's. Dad knew his way around a lot of work done by different crafts, and we had a good assortment of tools and a home shop in the basement. We had one tenant in particular who seemed to create plumbing problems on a nearly weekly basis. A typical example would be his kids flushing some toy down the toilet and then having waste/toilet paper flushed to jam and clog against the toy. Another example was the time his kids decided to play football in the house. Problem was they had no football, so used a glass bottle of 'Old Spice' aftershave for the football. One kid went out for the pass, did not connect, and the Old Spice bottle busted the ceramic toilet on a Friday night. We had the tenant family traipsing in and out of our apartment to use the toilet all weekend.
Dad kept a few plumber's snakes and a 'closet bowl auger' for unclogging toilets. Dad was on 50% veteran's disability pension as a result of injuries suffered during WWII, and had a really bad right shoulder. If he reached wrong or over his head, his shoulder would dislocate and it took an orthopedic surgeon and anesthesia to put it back in right. The result was Dad got me started early on working on plumbing and other repairs. Getting under a sink or wriggling around or reaching up between joists in the basement to get to a shutoff valve was the kind of thing Dad had me doing early on. I also learned to use a 'force cup', working it like a pump, to clear clogged toilets before having to break out the 'closet bowl auger'.
The things that seemed guaranteed to clog drains in a home were hair and kitchen fats or heavy soap scum. Usually, we could drop the trap from a clogged sink and work a snake thru to the waste stack pipe. Dad's other ace-in-the-hole was pure lye. Sodium Hydroxide in flake form. The stuff was sold in cardboard containers with steel lids in the A & P store, or we got it at the local plumbing supply or hardware store. Hooker Lye, red can, did the trick for dissolving soap scum and hair clogs. We were living in Brooklyn, and I remember wondering why the directions on the Hooker Lye cans included information for making hog swill using lye. Dad taught me how to use the lye to clear bathroom sink and tub drains- which were notorious for hair/soap clogs. We did not bother with 'Liquid Plumber' or 'Draino'. Dad went for the real deal, buying flake lye. Like so many of the stronger solvents and chemicals we had when I was a kid, I am sure pure lye is verboten, too dangerous for the public to use. As a young fellow working in the instrument machine shop at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Hospital (about 1971), I learned that lye did a great job of putting an etched or 'frosted' finish on aluminum. We'd make certain parts of lab or other hospital equipment out of aluminum, and for something like a control panel face, or some machined parts, we'd put them in a plastic pail of lye solution. We used to go to the hospital plumbing shop or the hospital janitors and get some of their lye when we needed to put that etched finish on aluminum parts. You had to be quick about it, and it did not take long for a solution of pure lye in warm water to etch aluminum, then into the shop's slop sink and a cold water rinsing. Lye was good stuff when the tenant would dump a load of chicken fat down the kitchen sink drain, and when any bathroom tub or sink in our house clogged. I think lye, along with things like creosote (wood preservative) and "carbon tet" (used in fire extinguishers as well as for a 'spot remover' to clean garments) have all been declared too hazardous for the public to be using. Of course, seeing how the lye could quickly etch aluminum, it is a highly corrosive and potentially dangerous substance. Still, it was one good drain cleaner.