Getting Rid of Kitchen and Bathroom Smells
Is there a bad odour coming from your sink? Does it seem stronger after washing the dishes? What about at different times through the day? Not only is a stinky sink unpleasant, it can also affect the health of your family. The fastest and easiest way to attend to the problem is by calling your local plumber.
The reasons your sink smells
When you wash your dishes, pots, pans and cutlery, food debris is being flushed down the sink. Regardless of what’s on your dishes, and even though you may have scraped leftovers into the garbage, you still get grease, vegie scraps and fat residue. The water just takes it from the dishes into your drain. This can cause many future problems.
Your drain can be clogged by particles and food scraps. When you wash fats into the drain, they solidify once the water turns cold. Fat just sticks to the sides of the drain pipe and whatever is in it starts to rot. It’s not only the drain pipe, but blockages occur in the trap as well.
Your Bathroom Drains
In the case of the the outlets in your bathtub, your toilet or the basin, it’s usually a problem with the trap. It’s the ‘S’ bend in your pipe prevents sewage smells coming into the house. Another problem might be the seal around the toilet pedestal is cracked.
Any problems with leaky or dry traps in the bathroom should be fixed immediately, otherwise the house is going to have a lot of unpleasant odours. This can cause health problems as well. A plumber has the appropriate tools to unclog drains filled with hair, skin particles and soap.
Laundry Smells
A bad odour in the laundry can be put down to dirt in the washing machine. In our attempts to conserve energy, we now ash our clothes in water set at 40°C or less. This means that mould, grease and slime can build up inside the machine. Lower temperature water also makes it difficult for your washing machine to kill bedbugs, and the build-up of grease and dirt also affects the efficient operation of the machine.
Fixing the Smell Problems
With regard to the trap you can make sure it always has water in there. There are some highly corrosive mixtures on the market that can temporarily unclog a drain, you just need to be careful when pouring the stuff into your pipes.
A plumber is a little more expensive as a solution but could be a lot cheaper in the long run.
Taking pipes apart in the kitchen, the bathroom and cleaning filters and outlet pipes on the washing machine also means you have to put it all back together again. Heaven help your house if you make a mistake. The consequences will cost you a lot more than calling out a plumber.
A clogged pipe might be only a small part of the problem. What if the blockages are a lot further down your drain pipes? That could mean a build-up of pressure and eventually a burst pipe. Calling a plumber will fix the smell problem and might be the most economical solution after all