Hmm…I always thought it was the foaminess that did the scrubbing, so I always pour the baking soad/vinegar in quickly enough that it bubbles up through the drain and overflow. I’m using it for freshening/cleaning purposes rather than for unclogging though…
As for the boiling water, I always assumed that the idea is that the first flush should be hot. If you just use the tap, the water will be cold at first and gradually heat up. I don’t think it has to be boiling, but the hotter the better. I like the solution to use another tap and a hose.
Angie’s list is trying to sell me discounts for plumbers at $160 for drain cleaning (usually $260). Is this a rip-off?
I bet you can buy a plumber’s quality snake for a lot less than $300.
Sounds like it to me. Are there specialty drain cleaning services in your area? Guys who only do drains, not full plumbing services. They basically show up with a large power snake. Last time we had it done it was around $100, to have him show up on a Sunday with 1 hr. notice (only toilet in the house was clogged, and my wife was 8 mos. pregnant, so waiting until Monday was not an option).
I don’t see the point of mixing vinegar with baking soda. One’s an acid, the other a base. They neutralize each other, producing lots of foam in the process. This shouldn’t hurt your pipes, but I can’t really see how it helps, either.
If the problem is hard-water concretions - these are alkaline deposits. You can get rid of large chucks mechanically – I carved the lime deposits off the faucets in my Salt Lake City apartment with my pocket knife. But for complete removal, you want to use an acid.
So you should be using the vinegar, but I don’t see the point of the baking soda. Warming the vinegar might help. Out in Utah they sold Lime-Away to get rid of lime deposits. It’s basically perfumed dilute hydrochloric acid.
When I had to clean the lime scale out of the cooling coils in my diffusion pumps, I used concentrated hydrochloric acid. I don’t recommend this. But dilute acid, possibly heated, will do better than vinegar and baking soda.
And don’t use Drano – which is itself an alkaline material.
Acid, of course, can eat away at pipes, so use discretion. But if you pipes are clogged by hard water scale, you’ll have to eat through that before the acid will attack your pipes.
It generates carbon dioxide. If you dump vinegar and baking soda down the drain and then plug the drain securely, gas pressure builds up and loosens whatever is clogging the pipe.
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