Drain Odour Investigation
Have you ever experienced the following, your bathroom, en suite, utility room or maybe your kitchen smells of rotten eggs or sewage? In my experience you are not alone; it’s a very common occurrence. There are only a few things more unpalatable than the smell from a foul drain, especially inside your family home.
Drain smells in your home are never pleasant, often embarrassing and typically intermittent. Foul smelling odours are caused by a mixture of compounds released from a variety of organic and inorganic sources and if left untreated will impact on the air quality in your home. Depending on the nature of the malodour they may have an impact on your quality of life and overall wellbeing.
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What is Sewer Gas
Sewer gases can be a mixture of inorganic gases that contain such compounds as hydrogen sulphide ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen and hydrogen. The main cause of the odours, it is the hydrogen sulphide and related ammonia that are the key causes of bad smells.
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Drain Odours – Main Causes
The good news is that although it is a fairly common occurrence it is generally easily preventable; assuming the overall health of your drainage system is good.
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Siphonic Action
The best definition of siphonic action is, when atmospheric pressure pushes a liquid up and gravity pulls the same liquid down. This is called the siphonic affect and pertaining to removing waste water from a plumbing trap. Water will always flows from an area under the highest pressure to an area bearing the lowest pressure.
Here are a few reasons your plumbing traps fail. In our experience the most common reason is through siphonic action, this can occur with poor layout of your plumbing pipe-work. All the following are culprits, excessive pipe runs, the wrong type of trap being uses, the fall at the wrong angle,short connections into the main soil pipes can all cause the water in a trap to be removed by syphonage. The effect is the same as when you see dead leaves being drawn along by the wind behind a bus – only in this case it is the water from your trap being drawn along by the main flow of water. When it happens in a trap it is usually accompanied by a gurgling and/or sucking noise
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Evaporation From Trap Seals
Another common reason we find is that plumbing seal fail due to evaporation. If a kitchen, en suite or bathroom is unused for any period during very warm weather the body of water forming the seal inside the trap can evaporate. This problem is easy to resolve simply run from your tap fresh water through the trap and your water seal will be reinstated
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Evaporation from Trap Seals
Another common reason we find is that plumbing seal fail due to evaporation. If a kitchen, en suite or bathroom is unused for any period during very warm weather the body of water forming the seal inside the trap can evaporate. This problem is easy to resolve simply run from your tap fresh water through the trap and your water seal will be reinstated
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Vent Pipe
Another reason we come across that a lot of main drains are not properly vented via correct a soil vent pipe. This vent pipe is designed to provide another route for bad smells to go, diverting them away from your rooms – so the solution could be as easy as getting one of these installed by a plumber.
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Help Is At Hand
Emergency Plumber Swords is available to help so If you are experience foul odours in your home and you suspect may be drain related. Our plumbers can now track down the source of this problem by using our specialist smoke testing equipment.
In some cases these odours and bad smells sometimes tend to come and go, it can be very frustrating trying to pin point the problem is coming from, particularly if they have disappeared by the time we arrive at your home.
Using our specialist smoke testing machine, we will introduce a smoke test into the drainage plumbing system. This smoke test then allows the flowing of air in the pipe-work and then will escape from the plumbing pipe-work allowing use to pin point the source of the bad odours. We will trace the visible escape of smoke and establish the exact location of the problem. .
Once we have located the source of your drain problem we will offer you a permanent solution.
