I Fucked Up...Fatality.

Here's the quick back story. I had been sitting the plants on a stool in the bathtub to water them. Well, the occasional perlite grain eventually caught up with the drain, and clogged it up. Of course, I try the normal drain clearing methods (wish I had a snake). Plunger, drano, and so on. Finally, I get the thing to go down. Next day, 3 of my plants need to be watered that day so I set them in the tub. I watered them, I had Ph problems, so I wanted to flush a couple gallons of corrected water through each one.

I had 2 of them done, and started to water the third when I had noticed a problem. The drain wasn't working right, and there was an inch or so of water in the tub. I didn't think much of it at first, as the tub was clean, I had not used it since cleaning it. The room had a faint bleach smell that I attributed to the previous cleaning spree.

Then it dawned on me.... THe bleach smell wasn't from cleanup, it was from backup. Oh fuck.

Sure as shit, 3 of my plsants which I had just switched to flowering, were sitting in an inch or so of drano water.

Fuck

Fuck

Fuck

Luckily for me, the soil was soaking wet from flushing so it didn't wick up the toxic water....Except for that one plant that had only been given a little bit. The other stroke of luck, I had been growing this seed gotten from a friend, and it turned out to be a pure male. I let it sit for another week, as I wanted the pollen from the plant, being a different strain to me.

I ran a bunch more water through the other one saving it, she never showed a problem.

The girl that wasn't yet saturated and had wicked up some of that toxic water died of course. Poor thing. It started changing different yellows and greens, and developed spots on the leaves pretty quickly. The leaves curled and rolled up all over, it wasn't pretty. She was among the last of a strain that had a strong hermie trait, so I was looking to clean out the genetics from the garden anyhow, but I wasn't exactly planning on using bleach to do it. lol


OBTW. The drain itself... I tried and tried to get it unstuck, but this one was a tuffy. Everytime I tried to plunger the thing, the pressure wouldnt work on the clog because the overflow was letting the pressure back out into the atmosphere.

I knew I needed to plug that overflow, and wasn't sure how. Aha!! Just set a couple hundred pounds of water on it. Hydraulic pressure has incredible force potential!. I just filled the tub all the way, above the overflow which is plugged of course. As soon as I hit the clog with the plunger this time. the clog cut loose, and drained free.

wow, of all the bathtub flushing I have heard of over the years I've yet to hear about perlite clogging the drain, but it makes sense. thanks for sharing, hopefully this story will prevent somebody else from doing the same thing.

I wonder if in the situation where you accidentally poison your plant, but want to preserve that line, if you could immediately take clones - in theory they wouldn't be drawing up the toxic poo...

If you were quick about it probably.

I wouldn't worry about toxins getting into your body, if it were enough to do that, I really don't see the plant surviving, so it would be impossible.

Bummer. Crazy unforseen shit just happens sometimes, too bad it cost you a couple plants. Drano has some nasty shit in it, most obviously lye.

Just a side note: you can buy handheld snakes very cheap from Harbor frieght and I'm sure several other stores. They come in different lengths and actually will work if you can get one to reach the clog.

What I do is I have some 1 gallon buckets with no holes in em at all....put a drain pan that u put ur pots in and cut a hole in the center and set it ontop now when u water if fills the one gal bucket and if u pour water into ur plants slow no perlite will will flow out or over the lid

Dannoo93

Nice.



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Death by Drano jeez what a way to go. LOL But at least ya had some good karma workin for ya. Time to restock.

I should name the next one something appropriate.

Indiclean perhaps

Sounds more like a drug test additive. lol