Many products used for cleaning drains or where not specifically shown to be pure soduium hydroxide will contain additional products. In the case of drain cleaners addatives to cause foaming so as to distribute the sodium hydroxide include: aluminum pieces. This creates hydrogen gas bubbles and helps to distribute the sodium hydroxide liquid. I believe every dry drain cleaner I've seen contains aluminum pieces. New develpments , Jul 2009, are moving towards creating a foam to distribute the sodium hydroxide. This keeps it in contact with the plug more easily than if it were a liquid. Please add SPECIFIC sites and names with upc codes if you find a pure product for any thread where someone is looking for a pure product. Thankfully it's often the case that a low quality product is taken from the same assembly line as the higher quality products. It's simply eaiser to do this as the level of quality is not different and creating a 2nd or third assembly line makes no financial sense. I believe this is done for antibiotics used for fish and humans both come from the same assembly line and are simply packaged separately.

Washington state is not liberal in any sense by 'vote of the people' when it comes to trapping - any type and style of body hold trap to any animal wearing fur is illegal. That includes our lawn moles, but enforcement against persons using mole traps isn't common....the legislation wording made it applicable to even moles, it wasn't well thought out on more than one level. And yes, what looks good on paper to the voting public in the larger urban areas doesn't often work out well for those of us who actually interact with the issues in less populated areas. We're free to live trap them ourselves, or pay a professional to do that and it could come to the hiring, I was hoping to resolve the problem without spending money on raccoons. I can only relocate legally as far as our animal control facility site, no permit is available for relocation of raccoon. Taz, a barrel type trap might be something they haven't encountered and could be worth a try. That could make more sense than anything anyone of authority has suggested to me yet :)

I would be wary of trying to make lye out of stove ashes from what I have read it sounds difficult and well as it is unstable. I started with soap making in late November and was having a ball with all the different kinds that I could come up with. Finding Red Devil lye seemed so easy. Though I didnt not pay attention to the fact that I could only get it in one store in my area. That is until this week when I went back for more and I have been looking in every store I come to to on avail. I finally found some in an off the wall store in a small town. That is when I found out that it will no longer be sold in any of the stores. You might know that I would pick a new hobby that will be hard to get supplies for.

I remember doing this as a kid. We built a v-shaped trough out of two boards which ran on a slant from a barrel with a spigot at the bottom into another, smaller basin below. We put the fireplace ash in the top & poured water over it, let it run down the trough into the other basin. I remember pouring the lower basin back into the top barrel many times-- I guess to increase the strength of the lye. I remember the soap we made from it was really really hard & brittle & harsh & it seemed to sit on the shelf curing forever (although I think it was really probably just a standard 6 weeks). I have absolutely no idea where my mother got the recipe from or what it actually was, except that we also rendered the fat from months of bacon grease. I do remember we fragranced the soap by wrapping it in old teeshirts soaked in perfume. I STILL remember what it smelled like 40 some years later!