There are precious few inconveniences a cannabis smoker must deal with that are more of a pain in the ass than a nasty, dirty waterpipe or bong. Once that brown, gunky resin (which thankfully does not end up on our lungs, which is why we use a bong in the first place) gets caked on to the inside of your glass, it can be a massive ordeal to get it cleaned out. I have a pretty sizable piece of glass that stands at about 15” high, and its lower chamber, where all the water goes, just got more and more revolting over the years. Finally, one day I was sick of looking at it (and to a degree, smelling it), so I went out and purchased some alcohol and filled it up, and let it soak for about 24 hours. In the end, I was able to get it mostly cleaned up, though there were still nooks and corners down in there I simply could not get to. But a whole lot of effort had to be expended, and it’s a really disgusting process to endure.
Enter Piece Water, a product that purports to put an end to this filthy madness. While they won’t give up the precise formula of their solution, they claim it is “100% natural and non-toxic” and made from “mineral, vegetable and fruit extracts.” You can’t blame a company for not wanting to detail their trade secrets. Hell, Colonel Sanders & KFC have made a mint off their “11 herbs and spices” (though a quick search reveals they may not be so secret anymore; still, that’s always been their gimmick and likely always will be). I’ll be honest, I was a little wary about putting an unknown solution into my glass and breathing through it for months on end. Piece Water does offer up a “chemical analysis safety report” done by a scientist who assures users that it is 100% safe.
Since Piece Water does not claim to clean your bong – only prevent it from getting dirty – I had to go buy a fresh, clean piece of glass to test it out on. I didn’t want to break the bank just to write a review, so I went to my local head shop and the dude behind the counter quickly pointed to the markdown section: Reduced price bongs! Yay! I found a tiny bubbler for $20 and change and headed home. After filling it to about the same level as I would have water, I gave it a virgin rip on a new strain and got gloriously high. Piece Water also claims their product makes for cleaner and smoother hits, which is perhaps more debatable than simply, “Is my bong still clean?” Still, the hit was indeed nice and smooth and out of a small piece of glass as opposed to my over a foot long behemoth.
Obviously, there was no way to write this review based on one day, so, yes, this Piece Water experiment lasted for two or three months. Using the bubbler about half the time (alternating between it and DynaVap – which I’ve become increasingly dependent on), it was nice to get back into a classic waterpipe process. One thing I dealt with early on was taking too big a hit and having some of the Piece Water enter my mouth. I can’t say for certain it tastes like ass, but because of its unknown contents, I was just psychologically repulsed on principle. As the weeks moved on, I became less and less conscious of the liquid I was smoking through, and eventually ceased thinking about it at all. It certainly never, ever felt as though I was inhaling smoke through anything even remotely chemical, and I must say, in general the hits were pretty smooth, and probably smoother than they would have been had the glass been filled with regular water (though I did not go back and test the bubbler with tap as opposed to the Piece Water).
I’m the sort of person who prefers to use a screen in the bowl of any sort of bong or waterpipe, so it took a while to get it dirty enough to feel the experiment had reached its conclusion. Finally, once the Piece Water had become a solid tan color (which itself is slightly different from how bongwater looks), I realized I had done what I set out to do. There was also a fair amount of brown resin resting at the bottom of the glass, yet clearly not stuck to it. I swooshed it around, emptied out the bubbler, ran some tap water through it, and voilà! Aside from the small chamber beneath the bowl and the bowl itself – neither of which the Piece Water touched – the bubbler looked virtually as it did the day I bought it. And I immediately filled it back up with fresh, clean Piece Water.
