I know that most of you read my posts for my unending optimism and the occasional home repair tip. Well, as I’ve sometimes warned you, usually after a home or boat repair, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns out there. I have a sad story to tell you today so put out the dog, light the fire and make sure you have a hanky nearby.
WARNING: If your tear ducts are as clogged as my sink was this weekend, STOP READING NOW. The hydrostatic pressure on your sinuses could be fatal.
This all started with the best intentions. Given the pandemic, global warming, the Ukraine situation and the looming shortage of orange juice, I felt it was my duty to bring some joy to the world. After several years of abstinence, I fired up the oven and prepared to resume baking. Cookies, that is. What possible harm could come from such a wholesome activity?
On Friday, a school snow day no less, I pulled out all my culinary tools and ingredients and prepared to conjure up sweet goodness using secret alchemy.
Being a responsible and frugal chef, I had stored away my baking soda with a dated label so that I would know if this particular catalyst had gone beyond its effective date. I am a persnickety baker and simply won’t use stale ingredients.
The baking soda date was April 2018. Completely unacceptable for baking purposes. However, not wanting to overburden the local landfill, I decided to upcycle the aged soda by freshening my drain. You know the routine. Put aging baking soda in the refrigerator to absorb odors for months. Rediscover it years later. Dump it down the drain to absorb odors. If, in the intervening decades you happen to have a grease fire, throw the baking soda on it to save your humble abode.
Having no fire and a pristine refrigerator, I decided to skip those steps and put it down the drain. So frugal, so environmentally friendly, so dang responsible. Not that I even have a stinky drain – or at least not at that point.
The cookies were a spectacular success, as always. Goes without saying, yet there you have it, I said it anyway.
Saturday morning dawned cold and snowy, a perfect day to enjoy a few cookies and that I did. I also made a nice breakfast. Stuffed with calories, I started cleaning up in order to take my gluttony induced nap without guilt. That’s when I noticed the kitchen sink drain was not doing the only thing I ever ask of it – DRAIN.
I faced this problem a year ago and, after two days of bruised knuckles, deflated ego and smelly water, I called in the pros and bid farewell to $435. That was not going to happen this year – at least not the $435. As with most home repairs, I knew exactly what to do. Whether I could actually do it is entirely a different issue. At least this year, the pipe would be fresh smelling.
Spike got comfortable in his chair with a cookie and prepared to be entertained.
I pulled out towels, a big bowl and a 25 foot drain snake. I started by doing exactly the same thing I did last year. I carefully took off the drain trap, held it level so as not to spill any water, lifted it above me and dumped it into the sink drain. It promptly fell through the now open pipe BUT this time I had the bowl in place so the water landed harmlessly. Better than last year. I smugly took the bowl and, as god is my witness, lifted it up over the sink and dumped it. Even I can’t make this stuff up. Fortunately, the towel was nearby. Spike grabbed another cookie.
I then inserted the drain snake, banged my knuckles, invented and expressed curses and knocked over everything within reach, including my head. I then washed my hands, threw them up in supplication and grabbed the bowl that was now full of soapy water and threw it (the soapy water, not the bowl) out onto the formerly pristine snowy deck. I then watched 47 YouTube videos demonstrating the proper use of a drain snake. The first 46 Tubers did the usual “Watch this carefully…” and then got in the way of the camera right before the magic occurred. Number 47 finally showed me what to do.
I returned to the sink and gave it a good two or three snakings. I could feel stuff in there but I kept punching through and knew that I had cleared the clog. I reassembled everything, turned on the water and watched it sit there. Sometimes you know things that just aren’t true.
Now I understand that you really aren’t supposed to dump caustic chemicals down the drain because 1) they are horrible for the environment and 2) they don’t work. With that in mind, I only sent two courses of caustic poison down the recalcitrant drain. I followed it with several kettles of boiling water. The boiling water, not the kettles. I noted that the drain was clogged but, given enough time, it would eventually clear. This gave me hope. False hope, of course. I figured Sunday would be a fine day to finish off the repair, especially since Saturday had already come and gone.
I awoke Sunday morning all ready to save myself $435. But first there was one minor setback to deal with. I had no hot water. Pipes were frozen. As an economist, this might have pleased me, at least in theory. The frozen pipes, combined with the clogged drains created a nice sense of equilibrium. Also as an economist, I knew this was going to cost me so the theoretical joy and the empirical reality cancelled each other out – yet another case of equilibrium.
I boiled several kettles of water and threw them, the water not the kettles, at the frozen pipes on the outside of the house. Pipes outside the house? You betcha. In North Carolina, code allows a tankless water heater to sit outside the house. This is neither the first nor the last time that it will freeze. After about three gallons of boiling water, I had hot water again – not that I could use it in the kitchen but that’s beside the point. Or perhaps it is the point.
Encouraged by the slow drain rather than the stopped drain, I tore everything apart again and snaked the drain several times in order to scrape the few remaining unscathed knuckles I possessed. I then put it all together and determined that nothing had been achieved.
I then had a horrifying thought. What if that baking soda had done more than freshen the drain? What if it had CLOGGED the drain?
I grabbed a fresh box of baking soda and discovered treachery not seen since Blackbird roamed the seas. Go take a look at your box of baking soda. 99 out of 100 of you will have Arm & Hammer Baking Soda. Look closely at the arm and the hammer on the box. How does one get such a well-muscled arm? Not by baking cookies, I assure you. They might as well have named it Arm & Wrench because that’s a plumber’s arm if ever I’ve seen one. Arm & Hammer is in cahoots with the International Union of Ridiculously Overpriced Plumbers (IUROP). Throw baking soda down the sink? Who are you kidding? I would file a class action suit but that arm kinda scares me.
Fuming, I stared at the box and thought how those evildoers had turned the kindly act of baking into a monumental clog. The fuming turned to thinking. If you put baking soda by itself into your flour, nothing good will happen. You have to mix it with salt to create the proper chemical reaction. Fuming…hmmm. Baking soda, by itself, might clog the pipes but ACTIVATED baking soda is another story!
I grabbed the treasonous box of Arm & Wrench and pulled its nemesis out of the dark recesses of the pantry. Vinegar to the rescue! I only had some red wine vinegar but I figured it would do the trick. I dumped some more baking soda down the drain and then poured in the vinegar, causing two things to happen. First, Spike asked why it smelled like I had spilled wine. Second, the concoction started bubbling, foaming, even FUMING wildly as it attacked the clog, came back up the drain and generally made a mess of everything. An hour later, after pouring several gallons of boiling water down the drain, I noticed that the speed of drainage was approximately the same.
If some is good, more must be better! I went to the store and got a gallon of vinegar. I put another box of baking soda down the drain (doubtlessly pleasing the Arm & Wrench crowd) and chased it with a gallon of vinegar! Joyous sounds of environmentally friendly corrosive chemical reactions filled the kitchen – right up until Spike asked why the dishwasher was “talking” right before discovering all sorts of noxious liquids spilling out of it.
The drain gurgled, gasped and returned to its state of slow, nay, SLOWER draining.
I ate the last cookie and went to bed, having wasted an entire weekend on “fixing’ the issue. On Monday morning I called the plumber.
After confirming that the plumber was NOT a member of the conspiratorial IUROP, I let him in the house. He sniffed and asked if I had spilled some wine. He then evaluated the situation and estimated the job at $405, a significant savings over last year’s $435. Who says there’s inflation?
He went to work with all of his fancy tools and I went back to my real job. A few minutes later he called down to me. “You’d better come up here.” I felt the $30 savings slipping away.
He held out the drain trap to me.
“Do NOT put ice down the drain!” he counseled me.
“I didn’t put any ice down there. I put boiling water. The ice was in the hot water pipes, which is ironic on it’s own but…let me take a look. Ah! That’s not ice, that’s…solidified baking soda.”
“What? Why? HOW?”
“Look, I tried to use a little home chemistry to unclog it. Maybe more is not always better.”
He dug out the rock solid mass from the trap (which didn’t smell bad at all) and set up his Anaconda Python Cobra Super Extra Powerful Drain Snake. I went back to work, trying to concentrate as all manner of banging and screeching commenced in the kitchen.
“You better come up here.”
The plumber looked sad, buoyed only by the Maserati ads he was flicking through on his phone as he re-estimated the job.
“I have some bad news for you. I need to replace the pipe. Where’s the crawl space?”
“I have some bad news for me too, I think, as there is no crawl space.”
He looked at the wood floor, smiled and pressed Buy Now on the Maserati ad.
“No, no, no,” I said. “Don’t go ripping up the floor! You take that snake and tell it who’s boss! You’re a plumber, for god’s sake, don’t turn this over to the carpenters. You can do it! You have big arms just like on the baking soda box!”
He scowled and braced himself as he jammed the snake into the pit. The floor shook, my teeth rattled, my bank account drained faster than an empty pipe. I went back to work.
An hour later, the noise stopped. All was eerily quiet until I heard the unmistakable sound of dripping water. I sadly looked at the ceiling, waiting for the first signs of the leak to appear. Then I heard gushing water and knew that I should have sold the house last fall and moved aboard the boat.
“You better come up here.”
I returned to the kitchen to find both sink bowls brimming with hot water. No slow drain this time. Just sitting there. With a dramatic flourish (is there such a thing as a non-dramatic flourish?), the plumber reached his beefy arms into the sink, pulled the plugs and massive whirlpools started whirling as the water went shooting down the drain!
“I never call in the carpenters,” he crowed triumphantly, before taking down all my credit card numbers as well as my bank and investment accounts. If there’d been a cookie left, I think he would have taken that as well.
I know that most of you are sobbing now, probably to the point where you have your own spills to clean up. If that’s the case, you’d better go get a clean hanky because I have not yet gotten to the sad part of this story.
The cookie recipe used baking powder, not baking soda.
(Check out the video beginning at 2:20)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5pFpLwvc1k
