ComStar Pure Lye | 99% Pure Sodium Hydroxide Beads | Eco-Friendly, Industrial Strength, Biodegradable Drain Opener | Safe on Fixtures | Static-Free, Unique Beads for Soap Making | 1 lb. (30-500)

Lye don't lye. You want it gone? It wil be gone!

Let me first state that you need to follow all safety precautions when using this product. Gloves, Eye protection etc. I had an issue that has been ongoing for years - the washing machine would drain and water would back-fill into the kitchen sink then slowly drain out ok. Over the years I had plumbers come and snake the line from the kitchen and this would either solve the problem for a while or just not even work very well.Snaking does not get rid of anything, it just moves the gunk around. My house is 50 years old and I assume the pipes were filled with grease and lint combo that had gotten to a point where the pipes should have been replaced. I tried everything over the last few months. All the liquid plumbers, worthless enzymes etc etc. Literally wasted a few hundred dollars on all that. Nothing worked.The problem got so bad that water was now backing up into the washer drain pipe as well. I had to stand next to the washer during the drain cycle and stop the draining then start it again.I was almost ready to give up. I kept searching on Amazon and this Lye stuff showed up in the search result. I never heard of it before. I bought two of these and will now explain what my procedure was:Put on gloves and eye protection. Put about half of one container into a bucket. Added about 6 cups of cold water. Used old wooden chop sticks to slowly mix it. It will get really warm. Poured it slowly into the KITCHEN sink. Did the same thing again with the rest of container one and poured it into the WASHER drain pipe.I did not allow any water after that to get into the pipes for the whole night. I pre-poured water into buckets for washing hands and even late night pee runs were done in a bucket pre filled with water.I did this process for two nights in a row using both containers of this lye I bought. The next day I filled the kitchen sink with VERY hot water and dish soap. Let it drain. This was done each day so a total of twice.The problem stated has been completely solved. I can run the washing on full load and run the kitchen faucet at the same time as the washer drain cycle and there was no back-up of water. UNBELIEVABLE!!This was my last chance, if this didn't work then I would probably spend thousands to just have those outgoing pipes replaced. Thanks to the people who make this product.

It helped unclog my shower drain well enough to use it normally again. I used it after taking a hot shower, since it usually fills up from the clog it had plenty of time to heat up the pipes so I poured it down the drain once the water got low enough. It took a few tries, an overnight sit, and lots of boiled water but I can take a shower without worrying about it filling up anymore. Make sure to use this with gloves though, it burns skin if you don't notice you got it on yourself and its left too long.

Small easy to use bottle

There are so many interesting reviews of this product. It's not the first thing that you'd reach for to clear a clogged drain, so many of the reviews here tell of battles against serious blockages, where many attempts have failed until the lye finally won the day, concluding with weird sounds coming from the drain, and that moment of release as the water funnels down. Then there are the few scary stories where the lye solidified like cement, leading to professional plumbers knocking holes in the drywall. Our story is a bit different.Our kitchen drain clog hit about the same time it was realized that the Coid-19 was spreading in the Seattle area in early March 2020. After two or three years of the dishwasher occasionally backing up into the kitchen sink, one night the kitchen sink itself took hours to drain. What with the stay at home order, and us being at higher risk because of age, this is clearly going to be a do-it-yourself project, so I order a drain auger from Amazon. Little do we realize that this is going be a 10-week struggle. Ten weeks of disappointment and failure punctuated by occasional pandemic-slowed shipments of plumbing supplies.Well, a 3/8-inch auger won’t get around bends in the pipe. A ¼ inch one will, and after I learn how to use it without getting it all twisted inside the pipe, I realized that there is an immovable clog about 5 feet down. It cann’t be budged. On a zoom call, the brothers-in-law say, “use Draino.” So I pull out the dishwasher and disconnected it—I don’t want anything caustic backing up into that—and dump half of a large bottle down the drain. Up comes soapsuds, and a lot of sand. Not really sand, but fine light brown grit, fibrous food matter, ground up by the garbage disposal and deposited on the inside of the pipes over 35 years. As most of this settles to the bottom, the drain is now 100%, fully obstructed. A couple more half bottles of drain cleaner gel do nothing.Enter the lye, discovered through Google and described by hundreds of Amazon reviewers as a magic clog-buster. I couldn’t resist. Reading all of these reviews two things became clear. First, this stuff, pure NaOH, is dangerous, as it can burn holes and even dissolve flesh—it’s the stuff that Walter White should have used in Breaking Bad instead of sulfuric acid. It also dissolves aluminum, making explosive hydrogen gas in the process. Fortunately, like most houses, our pipes are lye-safe PVC. Secondly, one of the two ways to use this stuff, to dump the crystals directly into the drain, is just crazy—if the drain is damp but empty, the NaOH can hydrate and turn into a hard clumps that could further obstruct the pipes.So, I put on a long sleeve shirt, old pants, rubber gloves, a surgical mask, and a stocking cap, so that with my glasses, I am covered. I mix a half bottle of lye with about a liter of water in a glass jar, stir with a plastic spoon and chopstick until it’s thoroughly dissolved. It’s about 3 to 4 molar NaOH, and it gets hot. I use a steel funnel to carefully pour it through a bypass directly down into the pipe. Twelve hours later, near boiling water goes down the drain. No effect! None! By now we are looking through lists of plumbers, hoping to avoid someone who won’t wear masks and coughs a lot. By now, it’s Memorial Day weekend, so we don’t call yet.Then there is a small glimmer of hope. After 3 days the water starts to slowly drain, about a quart per 24 hours. No plumber, I’m going to work with this stuff. Another treatment, no difference. So, we send for another pound of lye from east coast Amazon warehouses. While waiting, more snaking. After hours of labor, suddenly the auger advances a couple of inches, but then the clog doesn’t yield further. Still, it is a small encouraging step. Then the third lye treatment again achieved nothing.I have no ideas other than more of the same. Then on another zoom call my son-in-law says to use a plunger and block the air vent. The plunger hadn’t worked before. But he’s a chemist, and he’s telling me to use physics. Newton! Gravity! Fluid dynamics…err, actually fluid statics, the study of fluids at rest. I fill up our large kitchen sink with water. That’s got to be 30 or 40 pounds of force, pressing down on the clog, pushing it down towards the main sewer line. Duct tape over the air vent. I plunge several times a day. After a couple of days, the water level in the sink only goes down about a half inch. Then I try the garbage disposal, which should pack a bigger punch that the plunger. As I start a second disposal blast, the water level starts to visibly drop. Then it’s rapidly spinning down the drain! “Freude, schöner Götterfunken!” In the words of Friedrich Schiller with music by Ludwig von Beethoven, “Watch that f***er flow!”So, my concluding thoughts are that lye should work wonders if your sink is seriously plugged by grease or hair. Our case was different. It didn’t directly fix the problem, but it contributed to the solution. But it is too dangerous and laborious for everyday use. I’ll keep a bottle of that drain cleaner gel around for occasional maintenance to ward off a future drain Armageddon.