Do You Love Your Plughole? (Buster Bathroom Drain Clear)

Member Name: wigglylittleworm

Product:	Buster Bathroom Drain Clear
Date:	29/09/08 (699 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none

Disadvantages: It didn't work

My shower has been slow to drain since we moved in to our house 18 months ago. Every so often I would take the plug off and manually remove whatever hair and debris was down there. Recently it had been draining slower than ever and there was nothing to be pulled from the part of the drain that is accessible to me and after having a friend recommend Mr Muscle sink unblocker I decided to try it.

When I got to Tesco I started reading the back of the bottles of sink unblockers and instead of Mr Muscle decided to pick up Buster bathroom drain clear as it was specially formulated for bathrooms and had more active ingredients than Mr Muscle.

The 300ml bottle cost me around £3 and it claims to unblock bathroom drains by dissolving hair and soap blockages. It contains the active ingredients sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide. It has a warning that it is corrosive and since it claimed to dissolve hair I was extremely careful not to splash any of it anywhere but the drain.

It is easy to use, you just pour it down the blocked drain, wait for it to work its magic (between 15 minutes and overnight) and then flush well with hot water. The Buster website has a pretty nifty video showing how it works.

It looks and smells pretty much like any bleach, I was surprised at how mild the smell was, I expected it to be much stronger. I put it down my shower drain in the evening and shut the shower door to keep the cat out and left it overnight. I'm sure the rest of you wont have this problem but this drove the cat nuts, the shower slide door is always open as this is one of his favourite places and he spent hours meowing and pawing at the door trying to open it!

It was about 12 hours later that I made my way back to the bathroom to flush the chemicals away. I got a kettle of boiling water and poured it down the plughole and it overflowed pretty much immediately again, it was obvious it had not worked. I turned the shower on just too check and the water was draining away just as slowly as it was before.

It was then I took some advice from a different friend who advised the good old fashined plunger and caustic soda route. One trip to the DIY shop later and £6 spent on soda crystals and a plunger and I was all set to go.

I poured the crystals and some boiling water down my drain and set to work with the plunger. Pretty quickly something disgusting came flying out onto the floor of the shower, a massive lump of hair. Now this was not any old hair but GREY hair, pretty alarming as no-one in this house has grey hair but I'm pretty sure the old woman who lived here before us did! No wonder the shower wasn't draining properly and I'm sure our hairs and bits of face pack were simply congealing round this old woman hair and making the blockage increasingly worse. Even typing that paragraph made me want to throw up a little bit.

Now my shower is running freely again but no thanks to the Buster bathroom drain clear.

I've no idea if this had any effect at all, perhaps it had dissolved and loosened some hair and this was too tough a job for it. It gets a low rating from me because I could not see any visible effects at all after leaving this overnight. Do yourself a favour if you have a similar problem, try a plunger and soda crystals first before you turn to the nasty and expensive chemicals.

More info on the Buster range from www.plugholesneedlovetoo.com

Summary: go buy a plunger and some soda crystals!