The drain in our master bathroom shower/bathtub gets slow at times. Hair, soap, shampoo… it all slowly builds up inside to the point where it’s annoying. I used to buy this “Heldengrün Öko-Rohrreiniger” that I found years ago on Amazon. Less agressive to your drain pipes, and the environment, not life-threatening toxic, made with just a few simple ingredients – and still very efficient on “slow drains”. When I poured the last cup of it down our bathtub drain a few days ago,  I wanted to reorder on Amazon – but the product was marked as “not available”.

So I found the manufacturer’s website and searched for the product there. No luck. I then contacted the manufacturer through their contact form on the website, asking what happened to that wonderful drain cleaner. Customer service replied promptly, saying that they are not making this product anymore – even though it was very popular – because they wanted to focus more on cosmetics now. I responded asking (since they’re not selling the drain cleaner anymore) if they would be willing to share their recipe. They didn’t want to do that – but shared the widely known method of mixing sodium carbonate with white vinegar to (maybe) unclog drains. Uhm, no, I tried that.

I really don’t give up so easily – and I still had the empty bottle of eco drain cleaner, with the ingredients listed on the label.

Armed with that vague list of only three active ingredients I had a friendly conversation with ChatGPT. Impressive results came out of that after tweaking my prompt a little bit. The AI gave me an easy to follow recipe to make my own eco-friendly drain cleaner. I tested it on our bathtub drain right away – works like a charm! Exactly the same results that I achieved with the product from Heldengrün.

If you want to try for yourself, here it is:

• Mix 1/2 cup sodium carbonate and 1/4 cup potassium carbonate in a bowl.
• Add 2 tablespoons of coco glucoside or similar sugar-based surfactant to the dry mix.
• Slowly add about 1/2 cup of hot water, stirring constantly to make a thick paste.
• Pour the paste directly into the drain. If the stuff is too thick to pour, add just a bit more hot water until it slowly runs into the drain.
• Follow up with 2 more cups of hot water.
• Let that sit for an hour or more.
• After that flush with generous amounts of hot water.

Bingo.

Just a little bit of caution, though. All the ingredients by themselves are non-toxic, food-grade, readily available to the general public. But when you mix them with water you get some pretty strong alkaline reaction. Wear rubber gloves to protect your hands and safety glasses to protect your eyes. If you accidentally get the product on your hands or in your eyes, wash with lots of running water immediately.