Sodium hydroxide reaction

Factual Questions
1

It was man against nature, red in tooth and claw, and I won. The shower drain had been running slower and slower and was finally to the point of intolerance: By the end of a shower there would be about two inches of water over my feet. So, yesterday I haul out the can of drain cleaner – sodium hydroxide crystals and some kind of metal shavings, aluminum I think – and dump the last of it down the drain, about three tablespoons worth. It makes a satisfying hiss as it reacts, and I wait the prescribed fifteen minutes, then turn on the tap to flush things away.

The result was not as I’d hoped; the drain was completely stopped now. So, I buy two cans of the stuff on the way home from work (I wanted to be well armed) and spent a patient two hours spooning in a bit, waiting a few minutes for things to slow down, spooning in a bit more, and waiting again. I was trying to keep things hot at the business end of the clog in a continuous assault. Finally I was awarded with a loud glurp, and the inch or so of water that had accumulated drained with alacrity. A flush with a couple gallons, and a wipe down of the shower floor to avoid lye burns on the bottoms of my feet, and I was done.

Now (finally) to the question. All through the process but particularly at the beginning, the steam arising from the submerged drain and the not-submerged overflow had a strong ammonia smell. There’s a door to the back yard in the bathroom so it was swept out pretty quickly, but a couple of times when the breeze faltered I’d be driven out for a couple minutes. What I was wondering was, where did the N in the NH[sub]3[/sub] come from? I’m guessing the hair that was presumably the main constituent of the clog, but I don’t really know.

Any organic chemist dopers out there?

2

Hair is mostly protein, which contains a lot of nitrogen, so that seems like the most likely source. Why not try making a solution of your drain cleaner stuff and dropping some hair in it to see what it smells like?

BTW, plumbers hate lye-based drain cleaners. If your attempts had failed and you had to call a plumber, that person would have had to snake out (or open up) a lye-filled pipe. Before using lye I would try a snake or an enzyme-based drain cleaner. A big potful of boiling water also works sometimes.

3

It’s a tub shower and something about eighteen inches in – I suspect the water trap – makes it tough to get any probes past it. I do have a small snake and tried it a couple years ago on that drain. It took a lot of fussing to get it past that point. It didn’t work, and then it was about a half hour to retrieve it, scared the whole time it was trapped for good. Never again on that drain.

Enzyme cleaners just makes it laugh and the gel NaOH cleaners generally fail as well. That’s why I went directly for the big guns, the solid stuff. This time was particularly stubborn; usually two doses does it.