My super is a dolt. He was fixing a leaky faucet and while he was here decided to treat the shower drain with one of those lye drain openers. What he didn’t realize is that I had just liberally AJAXed the tub this morning. Long story short, my drain is plugged with rock-hard lye. I was able to chisel a good portion of it out with a screwdriver and now at least the water will drain, but very slowly. I need something that will disolve it further down in the pipes. Any suggestions?
I’d think that hot water would do it, maybe helped with a little agitation and boring with a plumber’s snake.
There’s a temptation to suggest using acid, but I note that acid and concenttrated lye will, in even the ideal case, produce a lot of heat and agitation of their own, which will tend to boil that acid back at you. At worst, nothing will happen, and you’ll be stuck with a pipeful of standing acid. Not a good thing, in either case. (Acid and base ought to be mixed, if at all, in the presence of lots of cold water.) My advice is to stay away from such a chemical solution (pun intended). at least hot water will eventually cool down on its own, and can be siphoned away.
Have you tried a steady flow of hot water? It may be slow, but I think that is your best bet. A more sure approach would be if you have easy access to the J trap (or P trap? I always get them mixed up), then take the pipe apart and clear it manually. But I doubt that is easily reachable without removing the tub.
Another solution would be to remove the strainer and whatever else covers the drain and hit it with a sink/drain snake.
Thanks, Cal. I’ll try running the hot water for a while. If that doesn’t have an appreciable effect I’ll try a weak acid (with lots of cold water.) Do you vinegar will work?
My gut feeling is to stay away from acids, as I said. You’ll probably get further (if the hot water fails) by mechanically taking it apart, as Cynical suggests.
If you do end up trying it, don’t do anything stronger than vinegar. You might want gloves and goggles, too, if you’ve really got concentrated lye down there.
– CalMeacham, who got burns on his hands from using hydrochloric acid to dissolve lime in his diffusion pump coils.
Well I decided to start off with the remainder of a carton of lemonade. Didn’t seem to have an appreciable effect, but my bathroom is now lemony fresh.
Watching water go down the drain is not very exciting. I’ll be back later, I gotta pick up my friend at the airport! (Yes, this had to happen when I have company staying for a few days.)
Just wanna emphasize – be careful of anything that might splash or get shot back at you. Even if you’re only putting water in there, it’s not fun to get hot water on you. And even less fun to get hot lye solution. Safety first, and wear goggles.
Is it truly a shower, or are you using the generic term for a bathtub with a wall mounted showerhead? If a shower, then access to the drain piping is usually accomplished from the floor below. If it’s a tub, then be careful when using snakes, as the drain shoe, overflow tube and drain tube all come together in a waste tee which incorporates slip joints. Vigorous snake action can disassemble things inside the wall/floor and without an access panel the cost of repair just went up.
I f you want to go the acid route, toilet descaler might do it. It’s a dilute acid (hydrochloric?) and it’s thick enough to stick around in the clogged area a while.
Caveats about heat evolved apply - maybe run cold water and trickle the descaler into it to start with. Although if you have a solid mass of lye, the reaction area won’t be that large. Still, beware of it spitting back at you.
Agreed, my old super always preferred to use a pot of boiling water to clear the bathtub drain as opposed to using any chemicals. There’s not much that it can’t take care of. If it’s water-soluble, boiling water will take care of it.
Are you sure the plug is concentrated lye? Ajax is primarily sodium carbonate with some sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate and a dab of quartz. I don’t see anything there that would cause lye to harden, although if the pH was high enough the sodium carbonate from the Ajax might have precipitated.
Sodium carbonate has an unusual solubility curve, and once you get over around 100 deg F the solubility decreases. If the boiling water doesn’t help, try lukewarm.
Couldn’t it just be loosened crap (from the lye) that’s clogging the drain?
I think throwing hot water down a drain full of solidified caustic solution is a Bad Thing. If you pour from a pot, your face will be over the drain, and if that stuff splashes on/in your eyes/skin/mouth/nose/ears/any part of your body, it would be very bad, and even worse when it’s hot.
Call the super, preferably late at night, or in the middle of a ballgame.