Unclogging Your Drain Is A Breeze With This Fizzy Bathroom Staple
Cascading warm water gently massages your back as you wake up from the early morning fog. Your morning shower is the daily ritual that brings you back to life. All of a sudden, you feel the water pooling at your feet. You look down, and the bathtub drain is totally submerged — gurgling from the blockage. The timing couldn't be worse because you never bought more drain cleaner, so there you stand, ankle-deep in soapy water. You could get out of the shower, haphazardly dry yourself, and scurry to the kitchen for baking soda and vinegar. Or you could unclog your drain with these unexpected items. You can search the medicine cabinet for another solution.
Did you know that denture tablets work wonders on stopped-up drains? At $5-7 for 120 tablets, this is a much more cost-effective solution than drain cleaners, which cost $14 for a 32-oz bottle. Alka-Seltzer is another way to clear a clogged drain with an unexpected staple.
Plus, the much gentler denture tablets won't do permanent damage to your pipes the way draining cleaner will. "What Drano will do ― if you don't know your plumbing system and you have old pipes ― is it will actually eat through the old pipes," plumber Kelly Ireland told Yahoo Finance. "So, sure, it'll get rid of the clog, but it'll also start raining in your living room." No one wants a makeshift living room swimming pool, after all.
How to use denture tablets for drain clogs
If you've ever seen denture cleaning tablets in action, you know that their fizzy action power attacks the nasty gunk on dentures. They do something similar to your clogged pipes, breaking up the yuck so water can move through them again. All you need to do is break three tablets, put them down the drain, and chase them with a cup of white vinegar. After you let that reaction do its thing, follow up with hot water. This should work for mild clogs. You may need to do this process a few times for more intense clogs. Even so, if you buy a box of 120 denture tablets, you'll still get 40 uses out of them. Meanwhile, a 32-ounce bottle of drain cleaner might get you one or two uses, depending on how much product you use each time.
These cleaning tablets work because they contain common cleaning ingredients that make pearly whites pearly again. Some of those ingredients include baking soda, sodium carbonate, and a hydrogen peroxide stabilizer known as pentasodium triphosphate. Hydrogen peroxide is another common household ingredient that can unclog slow-draining sinks and tubs. Next time you have a clog, consider these multipurpose cleaning tablets instead of the usual drain cleaner for your pipes and your wallet.