The woman was standing in front of my son’s 7th grade science fair project crying and shaking her head. Darn, I didn’t think it was that bad! One of the teachers finally went over to the woman and asked if she was okay. The woman said she was crying because she had spent so much money on drain cleaners over the years, just to find out they don’t work.
When you have a Long Beach Plumber for a dad, all of life’s problems are connected to plumbing. When my wife is depressed and crabby, it’s probably a monthly plumbing problem. The balances on her credit cards are growing, that is a drainage problem. It is obvious my one son has a gas leak. The other son has trouble going number two because of a drain stoppage. Try a little drain cleaner son. That might help. So, when my son said he had a science project to do, we begin at the usual point, foam planets, dry ice, soda bottles, insects, batteries, and boredom. Surely we can think of something that is interesting, practical, and useful. That would have to be something new.
My wife and I have already run the usual gamut of science fair projects with our older son. Brain storm! A plumbing science project. After all, plumbing involves a lot of science and engineering. Believe it or not, there are guys with PhD’s in science working on toilets in laboratories. They are trying to figure out how to flush 4,000 ping pong balls with three teaspoons of water.
Okay, so what is a common plumbing issue that people would be interested in because they encounter it in their lives? Drainage problems! Yes, everyone has drain stoppages. Hey, how about testing some drain cleaning products!? By now, I am getting pretty excited. Sometimes it’s a little hard to understand why certain things excite people.Let me try to explain. I might be able to help my son with his science project and learn something useful at the same time. I really cannot improve my daily life much by knowing the rotation of the planets. It is interesting but does not impact my daily decision making.
We needed some clear pipe so we could see what was happening to the stoppage as we applied drain cleaners. Two hundred and twenty five dollars later, I had some glass pipe and fittings. This is the pipe that is used in certain industrial and laboratory applications. Our set up looked like a giant bong. Now see, that probably excites the medical marijuana users.
Our stoppage mixture was a concoction of grease, hair, and food. Yummy! We stuffed this mess into the P-trap, put the pipe tailpiece back on, and tried our first drain cleaner. Amazingly little action. Waiting longer did nothing. We cleaned out our pipe, stopped it up again, and poured in the next drain cleaner. We repeated this process about eight times with all of the different drain cleaners we bought to experiment with.
None of the drain cleaners cleared the stoppage. One drain cleaner, that has a lot of sulfuric acid in it, heated up the pipe so much you could not touch it. But it did not clear the stoppage. Very enlightening experiment.
One of the hallmarks of scientific discovery is the reproducibility of the experiment and the results, by others. Similar results by others, when they do the same experiment, leads scientists to believe the results from the first experiment are valid. So, all of you plumbing scientists out there who are also excited about weird things, give it a shot.
For our customers, please do not put anything into the drain pipe before you call us. It appears they do little or nothing to clear the stoppage and they are dangerous for us and you. Splashed into human eyes, these chemicals can cause serious problems.Oh, maybe that’s why the woman was crying!
