When Your Sinks Smell, Get Help

Most people know it’s time to call for plumbing services if a toilet is overflowing, or there’s a break in the water pipe, and you see visible water damage in the ceiling. But sometimes, the issue can be something you can’t see, but you can certainly smell it. What do you then?

The DIY Fix

In some cases, if you’re detecting a bad smell—especially a sewage smell—coming from drains, it may be because you have a “dry trap.” This is the most likely cause if you’re only detecting the smell from one drain in particular. A dry trap means the layer of water that normally acts as a vapor barrier between your drainpipe and sewage pipe is gone.

Pouring water into an empty trap is the fastest, cheapest, best way to address this, and anyone can do it.

The Professional Fix With Plumbing Services

Sometimes, however, you may detect the smell from many drains, and you already know that these drains don’t have dry traps, or you’ve refilled them with water, and the smell persists. In these cases, you should call a professional, because a lingering smell in your pipes indicates that something is stuck, and it is encouraging the growth of bacteria.

Leaving this alone may pose a serious health risk for people in the home, and breathing in the fumes or spores of contaminants in your drain can lead to symptoms like headaches, nausea, and worse. A possible consequence of a smell coming from drains is also that whatever has caused a contaminant to stick is catching other things, eventually building up layers that will slow down drainage and eventually block it entirely, causing wastewater to back up.

Before this happens, you should call plumbing services and let the professionals handle it. Experts with the right tools can quickly locate where in your pipe system the issue is, and resolve it.