I recently bought a nice bubbler. It works great. But it's made of all clear glass, so it very quickly goes from looking like a lovely piece of precision glassware to looking like a filthy piece of used smokeware. The water also got foul quickly, probably because of how little water there was in it.
On a whim, I decided to try putting baking soda into it. I put in enough that there was still solid baking soda under the water. Baking soda water lasted at least twice as long before it started to have an adverse effect on the taste of the smoke. And more surprisingly, the pipe didn't get dirty like it used to. Brown resin that had been there actually came off instead of getting worse as I smoked out of it. After using it for a while (over 2-3 weeks of smoking it every day) it started to get a faint white stain below the water line - this came out easy with the usual rubbing alcohol + salt shake, and I could easily have let it go for another 2-3 weeks before it looked bad enough to need to clean (I wanted to make sure it came out). With regular water, I felt like it needed to be cleaned with salt and rubbing alcohol after less than 2 weeks.
I'm impressed - has anyone else tried this? I highly recommend it.
On a whim, I decided to try putting baking soda into it. I put in enough that there was still solid baking soda under the water. Baking soda water lasted at least twice as long before it started to have an adverse effect on the taste of the smoke. And more surprisingly, the pipe didn't get dirty like it used to. Brown resin that had been there actually came off instead of getting worse as I smoked out of it. After using it for a while (over 2-3 weeks of smoking it every day) it started to get a faint white stain below the water line - this came out easy with the usual rubbing alcohol + salt shake, and I could easily have let it go for another 2-3 weeks before it looked bad enough to need to clean (I wanted to make sure it came out). With regular water, I felt like it needed to be cleaned with salt and rubbing alcohol after less than 2 weeks.
I'm impressed - has anyone else tried this? I highly recommend it.