Yes, folks, it’s yet another in my series of experiments to try to find a nontoxic way to Unclog my constantly-clogging bathtub Drain. My tub is running really slow right now, so I am going to try to determine the following: does boiling water unclog a drain?
If you have been following this blog, you know that so far I have tried:
- Vinegar and Baking Soda
- Dawn Dish Soap
- Eco Punch
- Bio-Clean
None of these have given me great results. And frankly, I have gotten the impression that what little benefit I have gotten from these treatments might be due more to the hot water than whatever products I am using. So I decided to do a straight-up test on using plain old boiling water to unclog my drain and see how that goes.
Caution: If you have a newer home with PVC drain pipes, you may want to be cautious with dumping boiling water directly into your drain. Read more here.
Using Boiling Water to Unclog a Drain
I will run this test the same as all the others. First I mark a spot on the side of the tub with a piece of masking tape.
Then I put a stopper in the drain and fill the tub to the bottom of the tape line. I start a timer as soon as I remove the stopper, timing how long it takes to drain. This is my control time.
Control Time: 7 minutes, 53 seconds
As I said, my tub is running REALLY slow right now. Any improvement I can get on this draining time would be very welcome. So I heated and dumped three full pots of boiling hot water down the drain. (FYI, I used an electric teapot, the water gets nice and piping hot fairly quickly.)
Then I stopped the drain, refilled the tub to the line and timed how long it took to drain again.
After 3 Pots Boiling Water: 5 minutes and 53 seconds
That’s an improvement of 2 minutes exactly. Pretty good! Still, the water is definitely not draining quickly yet, it still backs up into the tub. I decided to go ahead and dump two more pots of boiling water down the drain to see if I could continue to make progress.
After 5 Pots Boiling Water: 5 minutes and 36 seconds
So only an improvement of 17 seconds more. As I kind of expected, there are diminishing returns after the initial improvement. Over the course of the week, I continued to put more boiling water down this drain in hopes that eventually it would run clear, but it’s still backing up. It seems like I have gotten as much benefit out of the hot water as I’m going to get.
Conclusion
Go ahead and try boiling water to unclog your drain, it does seem to help somewhat, but don’t expect miracles.
The post Does Boiling Water Unclog a Drain? I Tested It. appeared first on Green and Grumpy.
