Drain Care Powder

Details

This is not a drain opener and it is important to say so before anything else. Chemically it is not a cleaning agent at all: it is a live spore-forming Bacillus culture, subtilis, licheniformis and amyloliquefaciens, at a declared 2 x 10^9 colony-forming units per gram counted by plate count at a NABL-accredited microbiology laboratory, blended with a directly dosed enzyme pack at 4 percent, soda ash as a mild fat softener, and a wheat bran carrier. The spores wake in the trap, colonise the grease film on the pipe wall and eat it over several hours a night. There is no BIS product specification covering a biological drain treatment, so the CFU count is the number to hold us to, and we declare it at manufacture and guarantee 1 x 10^9 per gram at the end of the eighteen month shelf life, because a live count falls with time and a pack that prints a single number and no date is telling you the easier half. The enzymes, protease, lipase, amylase and cellulase, are there to start work in the first hours before the culture establishes. An enzyme figure on a drain product is close to meaningless on its own, because almost all the working enzyme is what the bacteria secrete in the pipe overnight, not what was in the scoop.

• What it is not: no caustic soda, no sulphuric acid, no sodium hydroxide, no chlorine bleach, no phosphate, no dye, no perfume
• Why that matters. A caustic or acid drain opener generates real heat inside the pipe, enough to soften and deform a PVC line, it burns skin instantly on a splash-back out of a standing trap, and it sterilises a septic tank
• The safety position, in full, because a biological product has its own hazard and nobody prints it. This will not burn you. It is a fine powder of bacterial spores and enzymes, and inhaled enzyme dust is a genuine respiratory sensitiser, which is a recognised occupational hazard where these powders are handled in bulk. So pour, never shake or scatter, keep your face away from the drain, keep the jar closed between uses, and do not use it in a small unventilated bathroom with the door shut
• Never mix it with anything else. Not bleach, not an acid cleaner, not a caustic opener, not our own toilet cleaner. Any of them kills the culture outright
• And do not use it in a drain that has had a caustic or acid opener poured down it in the previous 48 hours. Residue sitting in the trap will kill the culture, you will conclude the product does not work, and you will be wrong about why
• Actively good for a septic tank rather than merely tolerated by one, because it is the same class of organism the tank already runs on
• Warm water, not boiling. Above about 50 C the vegetative cells die and the enzymes denature. The spores survive, but you have wasted a dose
• The honest limit, twice. It will not open a drain that is already hard blocked, so clear that mechanically first. And on a slow drain it takes four to six weeks of weekly use before the line runs properly, because it is digesting a film rather than dissolving a plug. Anyone who wants it fixed tonight should buy a caustic opener and accept everything above
• Dose 25 g, about two tablespoons, at night, followed by a mug of warm water, then no water down that line until morning. That is 20 treatments from the 500 g jar at Rs 12.45 each, and 40 from the 1 kg refill at Rs 11.23