Drano
Drain cleaner
Drano (styled as Drāno) is an American brand of chemical drain cleaner that is manufactured by S. C. Johnson & Son.
Crystal Drano
According to the National Institutes of Health's Household Products Database, the crystal form is composed of:
Sodium hydroxide (lye), NaOH
Sodium nitrate, NaNO3
Sodium chloride (salt), NaCl
Aluminium shards, Al
After Drano crystals are added to water, the reaction works as follows:
Aluminium reacts with lye: 2NaOH + 2Al + 2H2O → 3H2 + 2NaAlO2, although the exact species in solution may be NaAl(OH)4. The release of hydrogen gas stirs the mixture and improves the interaction between the lye and the materials clogging the drain. It's possible that pressure may build up inside the pipe, causing the hot, caustic solution to spurt out of the drain.
Sodium nitrate reacts with hydrogen gas: Na+ + NO3− + 4H2 → NaOH + NH3 + 2H2O. This removes hydrogen, which poses a fire and explosion hazard and produces ammonia, which is also capable of decomposing organic material, albeit less aggressively than lye. The sodium hydroxide (lye) is consumed by further action of the first reaction.
Crystal Drano was invented in 1923 by Harry Drackett. From the 1960s into the 1980s, Drackett advertised Once in every week, Drano in every drain.
Bristol-Myers bought the Drackett Company in 1965 and sold it to S. C. Johnson in 1992. Drano has been developed into several forms; as of 2016, the original Crystal Drano is marketed as Drano Kitchen Crystals Clog Remover.
The public source identifies “Drano” as drain cleaner. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Drano, Drain and cleaner.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5305817. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1923, 1965, 1992 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Drano” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.