So I have been using my bong quite a lot recently and I started to wonder if there are any common addons for taste/cleaning help.

Ive started putting citric acid into my bongwater and it seems it really nicely helps the bong from getting all glued up. But the bongwater gets really really amber colored from all the dissolved oil.

Im also currently trying adding small amounts of essential oils for maskin the stale taste.
1 drop of mint oil basically turns the bong tastin like toothpaste.

Also I tried out many solvents for cleaning and found out basically all solvents but water work very well especially if you just add a fine salt into the bong and shake it.

DONT USE SOLVENTS AS BONG WATER

Use isopropyl alcohol.

I've never found the salt to be necessary, I just submerge the piece in ISO overnight, take it out the next day, and rinse it under water. You can keep the dirty iso and keep using it until it becomes ineffective.

Isopropyl alcohol is a common household cleaner and antiseptic - it's very cheap and can be found in the pharmacy first-aid section, but you may need to ask for it as it's sometimes kept behind the counter.

Despite that it's often sold in plastic bottles, I would avoid using it to clean plastic pieces as certain plastics may leach chemicals into the solvent - and overtime those chemicals may inadvertently end up leaving traces on your smoking device.

I dont find IPA to be any more effective than acetone or ethanol.
What I found to be best was 99% acetic acid and ethanol.
Those will form ethyl acetate which is a great solvent and the acidity really seem to help eat away at the wax.
Also for IPA you really dont need to worry about any leeching.
Especially in HDPE you can be very very sure that it doesnt dissolve it. Also generally any nasties that would dissolve into the IPA would be flushed out with the IPA or by water anyways.

I find the salt also not needed but especially with some bongheads you will end up pulling in the ash into the water which will need some physical force to get unstuck from percs and disks in the bong.

I've totally destroyed an acrylic bong with isopropanol.


Good riddance, I say!





C'mon, not even a dash of chloroform?

I use a minimal amount of IPA, salt and water. Then i shake the crap out of it, covering all orifices with my hands, so nothing spills. The IPA is pretty good at getting rid of the gunk, and the salt acts as an abrasive (gotta keep on adding salt past the saturation point). I do this maybe once every 3 months. And every time, the bong looks brand spanking new.

Oh wow. I cant even smoke out of the same bong three times in a row.

I've heard from many non-Aussies that it's a very Aussie thing to have a filthy bong. I change my bongwater when it looks like hangover piss, and i clean the whole bong when i can't read printed words through the glass.

A friend of mine adds vegetable oil to his bong water which apparently makes cleaning a lot easier.

When i still used to smoke i would crush up a dishwasher tab into the bong and then pour boiling water in it. This worked really well.

Yeah dishwasher tabs works wonders for cleaning glass.
But I do think over time this will etch the glass substantially.
Wouldnt wanna use that on a nice intricate bong.

Yeah mate. Back in the day when I used to run a hubbly if you spilled it it'd be like spilling radioactive waste. The cat would leave the room.

That's true but acetone is very strong-smelling, and IPA is not. Also, IPA is cheap and easily acquirable, whereas strong ethanol -for most people- is not. Out of those three solvents, I guess you can just choose the one that most suits your circumstances.

IPA has a distinct smell of hospital
The solvent smell shouldnt be the dealbreaker tho.

I just cleaned a borosilicate glass pipe, looks like the day it was purchased. I used a sodium hydroxide solution. I let it soak for a day or two then used a piece of paper towel & a wire pushed into the pipe to wipe it clean.This was done on a glass that was so bad most people would just bought another.

My collection has a history going back over 40 years. I got pipes that were sold in the 1970's, I always loved glass bongs. The first pipe I bought was glass at a head shop across from my junior high school in 1973 maybe it was '72. I can remember my best friend and me breaking it in, in my back yard.

I got into psychedelics after reading an article in psychology today back in the early '70's, thinking this is just what the Doctor ordered, off topic a bit.

Do you think that lowering the ph of the bong water has an effect, I bet it does. What could you learn from solvent/solvent extractions concerning partions? That can be applied to filtering gaseous chemicals through water. I think that should provide the answer you want about everything except flavoring your bong water, which is simple.

What ?
I think you should rewrite what you meant because i dont see any sense in that wording of yours.

I dont smoke, so this is just a casual idea, but why not try green tea?
Green tea is dirt cheap from your local asian market
It is antiseptic, keeping gross slime from growing in the bong as fast
It is full of antioxidants, green tea mist might reduce harmfulness of pro-oxidant smoke?
Gargling with green tea has been found to reduce incidence, or at least severity, of colds and flu[1] and whats smoking a bong but inefficiently gargling upside down while getting high?

It would not help keep it clean, it would in fact add polyphenol residues, but to make a cleaning solution dissolve a teaspoon of baking soda in half a cup of water and maintain it at boiling for a minute in the microwave. While still warm use it to scrub out the bong. Works wonders for coffee pots too, I keep some pre-made just for that.

[1] Gargling for oral hygiene and the development of fever in childhood: a population study in Japan

Shoot y'all, really? Cleaning glass is the easiest thing in the world. How very stoner to discuss ad infinitum the pros and cons of ethanol versus IPA.

*snort*

Then you never used your bong for realz.
Just like in some water boilers the limestone cake will build restiance to all acids and solvents

Hmm today i found a side effect of my citric acid bong water additive.

Not only does it keep the bong clean by dissolving the oils giving you organge pink bong water.
It also makes the ash bubble if you get it into the bong water.
Thats something you forget but ash is still very strongly alkaline with lots of Na2CO3 and K2CO3 and CaCO3 and MgCO3 formed when you burn it the bud or even hash.