I have a friend who heard that, when the bathtub drain is slow, she should pour down it a mixture of baking soda and vinegar.
I’m pretty sure this is not going to be any more effective than pouring salt water down the drain, since–according to my memories of highschool chemistry–isn’t that what you get when you mix a base with an acid (once the hydrogen cloud clears)?
Or has she maybe actually heard that if you pour first one down the drain, then the other, their reaction will blast clean the drain? But then I wonder if it might not just bubble back up to the light, leaving behind nothing but salt water.
Any clarification of this would be greatly appreciated.
If I were to say that today’s tomatoes are an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes.
–Russell Hoban in Turtle_Diary
Seems very weak. A lot less pressure than using a plumbers friend on it. I usually dump sulfuric acid down, its a drain cleaner like no other. You can buy it as a drain cleaner.
I don’t know how well it will work on a bathtub clog, since those seem to be mostly hair, but it couldn’t hurt to try. Maybe it could dislodge the hair from the soap scum around the pipes?
I use boiling water and baking soda to keep my kitchen sink from clogging. First, I pour in the baking soda, then the hot water. It makes a nice fizz, like those volcanoes from grade school, and I can use the baking soda that didn’t go down to clean the sink. I do this about once a week, or when I’m done washing some really greasy pans. It’s worked great, I’ve never had a clog.
Here’s the way we did it in the hospital kitchen and restaurant kitchen where I worked in my 20s. At the end of each day, you simply filled both sinks (assuming you have double sinks) with hot water as deep as it would run without overflowing, then pull the plugs on both sinks at the same time. The combination of water pressure and heat is usually more than enough to melt or dislodge anything that’s trying to stick. (A force cup is also good to have, of course.) It’s completely harmless to pipes and costs less for heating the water than for the pre-packaged chemicals (in any form) that you buy in a store.
Sulfuric acid will certainly dissolve hair – it may also play hell with your pipes. A sodium hydroxide/lye formula is, IMO, generally better.
I’m assuming you can’t physically get to your drain pipes. My house has a full basement, which makes plumbing maintenance wonderfully easy. I just stick a Drain King in the end of the pipe and let 'er flow.
"You’ll never get as much out of being right as you will from finding out why you were wrong . . . " The Papoon Principles Ch. 1.
I appreciate the plethora of replies, but if the helpful people who’ve responded will go back and read the original post, they’ll discover that I didn’t ask “what’s the best way to unclog a drain?” In fact, I didn’t even see my question as a plumbing question so much as a chemistry question:
Does the mixture of baking soda and vinegar have any value at all as a drain cleaner, or do the two chemicals simply cancel each other out and leave you with an inert salt water solution?
I’m not really interested, in the context of this question, in alternative means of clearing a drain; I’m only interested in learning whether this proposed method has any basis in science.
Thanks.
If I were to say that today’s tomatoes are an index of the decline of Western man I should be thought a crank but nations do not, I think, ascend on such tomatoes.
–Russell Hoban in Turtle_Diary
I’m not sure at all about the baking soda and vinegar solution… Seems to me that vinegar itself may do the trick on small clogs…and that adding bicarb to it is, shall I say, for show? Or, the cute little bubbles you get may actually server to help dislodge the clog.
And, you’re partially right about what you get when you mix an acid and a base. The solid precipitate that you get from the two is A salt… Not necessarily NaCl, which I presume to be the salt you refer. In order to get NaCl, you must have an acid-base combination containing these two elements in their chemical make up. For instance Hydrochloric Acid (HCl) + Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) will yield, in proper ratios, NaCl + H2O (also in respective ratios).
And, in my opinion, FWIW, just adding salt to a clog won’t do anything, for there is nothing left to cause any sort of reaction.
I hope that somehow helps…
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even checkered by defeat, than to rank with those poor souls who neither suffer much nor enjoy much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt
Baking soda and vinegar (acetic acid solution) will produce some carbon dioxide gas and a warm (it’s exothermic) solution of sodium acetate in water. I can’t see how this could be any more effective than warm or salty water in drain cleaning.
Oh, and Lissener, tell me abpout these hydrogen clouds, we could make millions!!
And here’s a coincidence, the quote above by Teddy R is in my thesis…weird huh?