[g.l.amour]

This week I decided to take the afternoon off at work so I could get to some maintenance. I reread Joe's article on using hydrogen peroxide for flushing. Got some of that at the local drugstore at 3% dilution. I had to dilute it even more with distilled water because I simply didn't have enough. Now, this already brought out a good amount of little crap. But I was thinking that with my dilution I wasn't getting the most out of my little cleaning session. I found some hydrochloric acid that the previous tenant had left behind for cleaning dirty toilets etc. That got me thinking; what kind of componentry can be found in toilets: plastic tubes, ceramic, and some metal tubes. I know from the long gone chemistry lessons that hydrochloric acid also eats away metal. But the original bottle had a 30% dilution that i mixed at +/- 9 parts distilled water , 1 part of 30% hydrochloric acid. I pumped this nasty stuff through my system (don't even think of inhaling some of those fumes, it is absolutely nasty, even at that 'mild' solution) switched off the pump for a minute, and started to see some pretty large gunks of black crap floating through the water. Thought that that couldn't be too good, and pumped the solution out again. Now you should have seen the debris that waq collected at the bottom of the cooking pot I was using as a res. The debris I can most easily describe as 1-3mm diameter pieces. They looked like when u dremel into black plastic, the black rocky shrapnel u get as the plastic burns.

What I am trying to get to is this. If the hydrochloric acid , as stated on the bottle, is used to clean plumbing systems: it cannot be that corrosive to metal or plastic, as both of those components are used in plumbing. It looks though that that nasty acid ate away pieces of the black plastic on my second rad.

The other possibility is that the acid dislodged alot of crap from WB and rad.

I have been using only demineralised water and generic radiator additive for about a year now. As distilled water and water wetter can be hard to come by where I live (found out that distilled water can be had cheap from drugstores), it could very well be that WB and rad were getting pretty clogged up. Although my temps were not increasing, like joe's temps made him flush his system.

Sooooo, plz chemists, what happened, did I eat away some good componentry or did I kill the crap?

Thx for sticking with me on this long post,