Are you getting a foul smell from your bathroom sink when you run water? Have you’ve tried those fancy smell-good drain deodorizers and probably every last old homeowner’s remedy known to man without getting any lasting results? Today is your lucky day because we will discuss drain smell solutions that actually work.
First, let’s eliminate sinks that smell because they were improperly installed, lacking sufficient venting. While an uncommon problem, we do discover this problem occasionally. If your contractor installed the sink when the house was built, the building inspector should have made sure the contractor installed proper venting. If you added a bathroom and you installed that sink after you built the home, and no one obtained a permit, check to be sure the installer correctly vented the drain and waste piping. Fixing this can be costly.
Next, we will assume that you have already removed the pop-up sink stopper and removed any build-up of hair and other waste products. You men won’t
like to hear this, but facial hair clogs up and decomposes in the drain just like women’s hair, and smells just as bad. Hopefully, you looked down the drain to make sure there wasn’t a hair build-up on the internal lever that moves the drain stopper up and down. If there is hair here, carefully use a coat hanger to try to remove it.
Odor is common in sinks with an overflow hole, usually found in the front of the sink. That’s because they require a special drain with an opening in them for the overflow hole to drain. Water that goes down the sink through the drain can plug up that opening, causing the smell. Hair, organic waste and soap scum can accumulate in that opening, even though nothing may have passed through the overflow drain in the sink itself. The solution to this type of smell is to remove the drain assembly from the bottom of the sink and clean the accumulated waste from the sink. Ceramic sinks are especially prone to this type of problem.
Fixing a sink smell in the Phoenix area may be more work than you’d like to tackle. Call the plumbing professionals at Sav-On Plumbing for an affordable solution to this problem.