apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Psst... most of those same sink stoppers unscrew and come off COMPLETELY so that they're not in the way ;)

My recipe for this includes salt along with the baking soda, for some reason. Also, I recommend using a chopstick instead of a q-tip.

Sadly I tried this over the weekend when my sink clogged up. No dice. I even tried it again a couple of hours later to no avail. *sigh* I had to resort to using Drano, which made my little green heart cringe.

This is how I clean my garbage disposal. It's a routine maintenance thing, not for clogs. But it does keep the sink and disposal smelling fresh and nice. Plus, it brings me back to my grade school volcano making days.

Vinegar and baking soda is much less expensive at Smart & Final or restaurant supply house.

I tried this a few weeks back and it worked wonders! We've had a slow sink drain every since we moved in two years ago. Earlier this year I tried some non-toxic drano type stuff and it was no go, but the baking soda/vinegar/boiling water did the trick!

I do this regularly in my bathtub. If it's clogged really badly, I have to do it twice, and I always use a big pot of boiling water, not just a kettle. In fact, if I pour a pot of boiling water down the drain on a weekly basis, when I'm cleaning the bathtub, the drain rarely gets slow enough to have to use the baking soda and vinegar.

If you mix a little water with your baking soda first, enough to make a sort of runny paste, that will help it slide down the drain and get into all the nooks and crannies. Adding salt helps because sodium is volatile and will help break up whatever is clogging the drain. If it's a tough clog, pour some boiling water down first, then add the baking soda/salt paste and let it sit overnight. (Of course you'll want to wait until the water drains to pour in the paste so it doesn't dissolve.) In the morning pour down the vinegar and once it stops fizzing follow it up with another pot of boiling water. This should take care of it! If not, try washing soda before you move on to more caustic solutions. Washing Soda is stronger than baking soda, is great at cutting through grease and you can find it in your laundry aisle at the grocery store. This is totally gross to mention but washing soda is what taxidermists use to clean flesh from bones. EEW!

use lye and hot water.
it's better than draino, (yes it's caustic) however, it's cheap and you only use a little, so it keeps for a loooong time.

plus, you can use the lye to make paper too....just a dab will do ya

Hmmm. I'm not sure why baking soda and vinegar would be useful... the baking soda is a base and the vinegar is an acid, so when you mix them together they form water and CO2, not very useful compounds for clearing a clog. I would think either vinegar or baking soda alone would be better. My guess is the boiling water is actually doing the trick.

Just to clarify: the acid and base are used up to make the water and CO2, so adding both neutralizez them.

fyi, lye and draino are basically the same thing -- they're very strong sodium hydroxide solutions.

i don't think vinegar would be any use in unclogging a drain. plain vinegar isn't acidic enough to dissolve any nasty deposits in a drain tube.

@laila, another great solution i found when we used to have a garbage disposal is to occasionally just throw in the rest of the lemon in after juicing it & letting it get ground up in the disposal. easy & cheap solution since you'd just be throwing/composting it anyway.

martha says boiling water is bad for your pipes and your connections.

a two liter bottle of good old coca-cola does the trick. pour it all at once...

Generally a sink drain is pretty easy to take apart, and most of the PVC fittings used in the drain can be unscrewed by hand.

If all else fails I say pull it apart, clean it out, and screw it all back together. Use plumbers tape on the joints.

grunion - I discovered that Coke trick completely by accident while cleaning up from a party one day. It works disturbingly well. In fact, I now consider Coke to be more of a drain clearer than a beverage!

If you don't want to use harsh chemicals and have a pretty severe clog I'd recommend a drain auger or "snake". You can buy them or rent them from most any hardware rental place for cheap. Just crank it down the drain hole, crank it back out and ta-da! Gross soap scum and hair balls galore Mmmm. Best of all no chemicals. Good old mechanical extraction and elbow grease works great!

Love this solution, have been meaning to clean out our sink for awhile, then this post comes along and I have a reason...
it worked a treat.

Worked like a charm, thank you!

I've been doing this but in a slightly different way. Whenever I run white vinegar through my coffeemaker to clean it, I use the hot vinegar to follow the baking soda down the drain and it works very well. This way the vinegar does two jobs instead of just one.

A plunger works pretty well sometimes, too.

If I get a hair clog I have a not-used-in-the-toilet-toilet-plunger. I plug up the over flow hole iwth my finger at the same time as plunging the drain. IT pulls up the hair (I can't unscrew the stopper to come out) and I grab it and pull the rest out.

Most drains are prettyy easy to take apart and just clean the scum and hair out of the mechanism. After my last pregnancy, the drains were horribly clogged from post-partum hair loss and we called in the plumber and he just showed us how to dismantle them and clean them thoroughly with no chemicals at all. I think it's more effective than these solutions would be.

I like to use Draino...it works very well and quickly. I think being green is rather silly. When you are as old as I am you will understand this whole green thing has come and gone many times before.

My old apartment plumber told me not to use Draino because most of the time it doesn't work, then the plumber has to deal with a pipeful of caustic chemicals.

Home Depot. $8 snake, $12 pipe wrench. You wrench the P-trap thing off (above a bucket), then twist the snake coil in as far as it will go. Then drag out a small hamster's worth of nastiness, put the p-trap back and you're good to go.

Also-NEVER water your plants in the sink. Potting soil is a culprit a lot of the time.

I use a mini plunger, purchased just for the sink. Works every time, although you do have to deal with some gunk that comes up. But sometimes the vinegar/baking soda is not strong enough, and I feel better about using the plunger than dumping other stuff down.

I will ditto the Coke trick--a plumber once told me it was best for really old pipes, as used on a regular basis it will cut through the schmutz but is more gentle than Drano.

I think I got the tip here, but the Cobra Zip It is our new best friend. It's about $3 at hardware stores and is a jaggy piece of long plastic that gets into all nooks and crannies. It says it can only be used once, but we've had the same one for a while now; you just have to stomach cleaning off the gross stuff that comes up. Anyway, it always works, takes 2 seconds and is chemical free.

Another vote for just taking apart the p-trap. That's where the clog usually is, and you won't need to dick around with toxic chemicals or boiling liquids.

Just make sure to use a chamois or towel if you're concerned about scratching up the fittings with your wrench.

this has worked for me plenty of times. sometimes it takes a little more work. likely hair clog. and i use a lacquer chopstick too, although it's easy enough to just unlatch the drain thing underneath and just remove it.

when it's not working so well, i plunge the sink a bit and gunk comes out the overflow hole. yucky yucky gunk

Baking soda and vinegar and hot water works - the baking soda is slightly abrasive - the vinegar melts away the goo - it all bubbles up into a fine drain cleaner. Use for maintenance, on a regular basis. If you are a seriously clogged, and it seems not to work, do it again, and then again if necessary - soon the drain will be wide open and cleam. Nothing expensive here, so no problem.