Talk:Drain cleaner

Safety issue
I have deleted the sentence " and often contain aluminium chips that react with the lye to generate hydrogen gas to agitate scum deposits in the blocked drainpipe " for safety reasons. The hydrogen gas would create a risk of fire or explosion and I'd be very surprised if any such product were on sale. See: Sodium_hydroxide. Biscuittin 13:28, 4 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I put the reference to aluminium turnings back, as in fact the cleaner Drāno contains such material. The reaction with aluminum is slow, and hydrogen diffuses very quickly, so the hypothetical danger from hydrogen ignition is remote.  A larger danger is that the cleaner heats the mixture to the boiling point of saturated sodium hydroxide, which is very effective at removing grease clogs, but poses its own safety issues. Norm Reitzel (talk) 13:23, 12 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I also added a citation to a PubMed article citing arsine poisoning caused by hydrogen evolution of said drain cleaner. Also, the MSDS for Draino Crystals is available at  Norm Reitzel (talk) 20:58, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Chemical Details
Cluebot initially caught this, and failed. This is documented on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:ClueBot_Commons/Archives/2010/March#Drain_cleaner. However, there was no reply. The additions made by Pgdp123 were helpful, but the alterations and subtractions were not. The chemical section was considerably altered and removed helpful information. There has been no explanation why this information was removed and changed. The chemical section is one which most people will use. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.182.22.167 (talk) 13:01, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

GHB
I want to add a section of the use of drain-cleaner to make the drug GHB.

Reference: http://www.projectghb.org/content/bad-child-internet

Anyone against this?

Paper
This doesn't make any sense: "and since sulfuric acid at high concentrations also has a strong dehydrating property, it readily dissolves tissue paper inside pipes through dehydration as well." drying out wet toilet paper inside a toilet makes no sense chemically or thermodynamically. It dissolves cellulose into simple carbohydrates by hydrolysis the same way it converts fats in fatty acids and glycerol, and converts proteins into amino acids. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) (talk) 15:31, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Hello Richard -- I have corrected the subject text by inserting a wikilink. Dehydration in this context is not dessication, a physical process, but a chemical process, Zimmer's Hydrogenesis, stripping an H2O group from the cellulose. Rhadow (talk) 23:41, 4 November 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
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External links modified
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Removing septic tank study cited in Enzymatic Drain Cleaners
Removing this sentence from Drain_cleaner: "A 1997 blind study of 48 septic systems with three additives, The Effect of Bacterial Additives on Septic Tank Performance [20] found no statistically significant difference in performance from an untreated system, including the buildup of sludge and scum.", with the cited study linked to http://waterquality.cce.cornell.edu/publications/CCEWQ-75-BacteriaAdditivesSepticTanks.pdf

The study in question did not refer in any way to drains, but to septic tanks, and it doesn't address any similarity to drain treatment. Septic tanks are often around 1,000 gallons in the US (3,800 liters), with enzyme treatments intended to work continually, while drain treatment usually involves a 1/8th of a gallon (1/2 liter) solution that stays in a small section of a drain for a few hours. --Agyle (talk) 04:05, 2 March 2019 (UTC)