It was great see the patent for our grip and rip technology finally come true!

http://oregonbusinessreport.com/2009/12/three-oregon-entrepreneurs-products-to-improve-lives/Three Oregon Entrepreneurs: Products to improve lives

We visit the homes of FaceBook Fans that are in need of some Drain Doctoring! We'll upload videos to this blog.

House Call Visit #1 (Give me a head with hair!)

House Call Visit #2 (Dave is let out of the box)

Did you ever wonder what it was you were standing in as the tub in your hotel shower backed up around your ankles? These pictures might give you a better idea. The picture on the left was what we pulled from twelve drains of a hotel only 8 yrs old one year after they last cleaned the plumbing (theirs, by the way, is an aggressive drain maintenance program). As a doctor, you might think I'd gotten immune to gross stuff, but hair clogs from a drain, or the thought of what bacteria I'm standing in as the hotel drain backs up, never ceases to make me dry heave a bit. So when you stay at a hotel next time, tell them about EverClear Drains...tell them they'd save over $3,500 in drain maintenance over 5 yrs and improve customer satisfaction by installing the EverClear Drain. Tell them about the gross stuff down in their plumbing, and how you are particularly fond of the thought that whatever is down there ends up around your ankles when the tub backs up...At the risk of sounding like a Marxist: "hotel denziens of the world unite...Demand clean plumbing in your rooms!!!!!"

Slowly but surely, we are getting noticed...Steve Greenberg from Gadget Nation has been presenting the EverClear Drain on television during the month of March...Green Gadgets rule!

The 10! Show

The View From the Bay

I'm glad this one was bagged...this kind of thing should't be allowed to roam free!

Synopsis: A bald man pitches product with someone else's hair, a cucumber, and the coriolis effect (note, viewers in the southern hemisphere may experience disorientation when viewing this video).

click here for video

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has considered the elimination of chemical drain cleaner sales to the general public because of the hazards they pose. According to the CPSC (2006 Petition HP 04-2) , the annual use of 75 million bottles of chemical drain cleaners costs the U.S. $93 million to medically treat injuries caused by chemical drain cleaners. This is compared $38 million in annual medical costs to treat injuries related to the use of the 1 billion lighters sold annually.

So why do we still have these chemicals on the store shelves? There are multiple reasons:

1) For awhile, the manufacturers of chemical drain cleaners were able to defer the issue because they (the Association of Chemical Producers) agreed to form a voluntary group dedicated to reducing associated injuries by changing their labeling, and packaging. A few of the proposed changes were implemented, but not all...and then the ad hoc work group disbanded because of liability issues...its tough to continue selling a product claimed to be safe safe for consumers while you have work groups working to resolve obvious safety problems.

2) The true scope of the problem (i.e. injuries caused by chemical drain cleaners) isn't truly known. While $93 million in injuries per year from chemical drain cleaners sounds impressive, it isn't enough to yank a product that makes people a great deal of $. However, having worked in the ER, I assure you that there are several issues that never get reported...its expensive in terms of time, documentation, and record maintenance to report to a higher authority, so only certain occurrences have mandatory reporting associated with them (like child abuse). Case in point from the same document sited above:

"It has always been difficult to get a handle on the injury numbers because we know the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) estimates, which only deal with injuries treated in hospital emergency rooms, are an undercount. The Toxic Exposure Surveillance System (TESS) data which compiles information on calls to poison centers is also an undercount, as not all poison control centers participate in TESS and not all incidents involving drain opener exposure would be reported to a poison control center (e.g., those involving dermal burns)."

3) The options to chemical drain cleaners aren't all that effective. I refer you back to our website for a detailed description of why that is, but basically, if you were to eliminate chemical drain cleaners from the market, you would have a lot of folks upset that they've been forced to call expensive plumbers for their drain woes from that point forward.

As you may now know, given my career in medicine, I was itching to tackle this problem head on. And our CTO, Dave Strayer jumped on this issue because he wanted to make his home safer for his two daughters. We thought, if there isn't a viable alternative to chemical drain cleaners, why not make one? Thats how the EverClear Drain came to be. So if you came to this blog because of your concerns on the issue, or even if you are only interested in saving time and $, I urge you to check out the rest of the website. I think you'll come to the conclusion that we've licked the problem...now its just a matter of getting our products into homes!

Regards,

Sean Scorvo, MD.