Living Off The Grid

The active ingredient in Draino and similar drain cleaners is sodium hydroxide. It sounds scary – and it can be – but most of us know this stuff as plain old caustic soda or lye, which I use in my homemade soap since it saponifies (turns into soap and is no longer lye) once mixed with fats like lard and coconut oil.

However – there are three other reasons for off-grid folks to stay away from Draino:

1. It costs money and the alternative (see below) is much cheaper.
2. You have to go to the store to get it, which makes you less self-reliant.
3. It can be bad for your septic system and plumbing.

Draino argues on their website that the product isn’t bad for septic systems. However, many engineers, scientists and septic system companies explicitly say otherwise. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to believe these sources over the one trying to sell their drain cleaner. The fact is, Draino is a caustic product. It can eat through stuff, including benefitial bacteria in your septic tank and, over time, metal pipes in your plumbing system.

I suppose that’s neither here nor there for off-grid people and the self-reliance type. We’re all about saving money and making as few trips to the store as possible, which makes the product below a better option than Draino.

If you’re clogged up way down in the pipes your best option is probably a drain snake and, if that doesn’t do it, you might have to take off some pipes. However, the vast majority of clogged drains are just backed up with hair hanging onto the drain stopper and/or jammed up in the trap (the u-shaped pipe). I can personally attest to the low-cost, efficiency and ease of using a Zip-It tool (costs under $5 on Amazon) to fix such clogged drains and I’ll never buy Draino again...

Note: That is not me in the video. I figure this guy did a pretty good job of showing how easy the Zip-It is to use and how perfectly it works (despite his wife grossing out over her own hair even though her poor husband is the one who has to deal with it, but I digress…) so why reinvent the wheel.