If you saw the movie Lucy with Scarlett Johansson, the blue powder in the video above may look familiar. In the movie, Johansson’s character has a powdered blue drug called CPH 4 stuffed into her stomach. Having so much of the substance in her system gives her all of these incredible powers. She basically becomes a time-traveling, omnipotent god.
See embedded trailer below
In real life, CPH 4 would kill you long before you ever had the chance to develop powers like that.
But there are some blue powders— like the one in the video, for instance— that really can be beneficial. They won’t give you powers, but they’re pretty powerful by themselves, particularly if your property has a lot of old pipes or a rusted out, delicate drainage system.
If there’s trees anywhere near your property, there’s really no way to avoid root growth. It’s just an inevitability. And it can become a real problem when those tree roots grow into 100 year old pipes that may not be durable enough anymore to sustain Roto-Rooter coming out and shoving metal snakes down them.
What can you do?
Well, one solution is copper sulfate. As you can see in the video, I’ve got a bag of copper sulfate. It comes in packages with a pound or two packed inside and usually sells for around $15-$30. We actually ship these packages out to our tenants to help prevent new root growth. If you can educate your tenants on how to use copper sulfate, it’s a very affordable way to maintain the drainage and sewer systems in your properties.
It’s very simple. You divide a package into 4 equal parts and you flush them down the toilet one after another. Usually it just takes a few days for the root growth to stop. Sometimes the roots that are already in the system will disintegrate as well.
Another product we use to clean out our pipes is called K-97. K-97 is a little more affordable than copper sulfate, and is used for items other than roots that are blocking your pipes. It’s essentially a bacteria/chemical solution and it digests paper, grease, and whatever other waste particles or foreign objects are clogging up your pipes.
I can’t authoritatively say that K-97 will work on roots— I only have personal experience with copper sulfate when dealing with roots— but it will eat right through things that shouldn’t be in your drainage system. It’s like Super Drano.
K-97 will run you around $15-$20 per package and you can ship it to your tenants just like copper sulfate. They just put it in their system at night and usually by morning the drains will already be flowing much more efficiently.
These are just a couple of solutions we use to maintain the drainage systems at our properties, particularly older or more delicate ones that run the risk of collapsing if you get too invasive or aggressive with your unclogging methods. And they save money.
So, like I said… they may not make you a superhuman like Scarlet Johansson’s Lucy character… but they should keep you from having to deal with an I Love Lucy-kind of calamity.
