Does Boiling Water Unclog a Drain? I Tested It.
Does Boiling Water Unclog a Drain? I Tested It.
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:
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 best thing I’ve found is a “drain zipper,” available at Home Depot, Lowe’s, even Walmart. They are less than $5 and easy to use. Downside is that they’re made of plastic, but you can reuse it over and over. I just clean it off, let it dry, then store it. I think I’m on my second one ever… Maybe the teeth on the first one eventually got too messed up? I can’t remember. But this is all we use now to unclog sinks and bathtubs.
We actually did try something like that a while back, but it didn’t seem to do much for the tub drain. Maybe I’ll give it another try sometime.
Had trouble for years ith drains , especially the kitchen one tried all sorts chemicals and nalural by far the best way is lots of washing soda\ soda crystals, not sure if that’s the name in the usa, along with the boiling water, they are useful for lots of cleaning tasks ….love your frog and intro!
Hmm…this is a new one to me, I’ve never even heard of washing soda. I will have to look it up and see if we can get it here in my area.