From time to time, customers here in Adelaide ask me about a sewer kind of odour in their bathroom. It might come from the drain in the shower, or the floor waste in the middle of the bathroom floor, or both. Sometimes people don’t know where it’s coming from – just that their bathroom frequently has a sewer odour in there. Usually the smell is noticed most when the air in the room hasn’t been stirred for a while – like when you’ve been at work all day and the house is closed up.

So what’s the problem? Simple: it’s bacteria! Don’t believe me? Get a torch and look in there! Take the grates off the floor drains if you can and look into the pipe and you’ll see grey slime or something similar that doesn’t belong there. You didn’t notice because it’s all dark under that floor grate so that bacteria had a breeding party right under your nose without you realising!

The solution: disinfectant. You can improvise and use bleach if you’re aching to cancel the odour real fast and you can’t find disinfectant in the house. You can get fancy with it if you want to and unscrew the floor grate and use a toilet brush down there etc. You’ve just got to be sure to kill that bacteria. Scalding hot water won’t work and you just risk getting burnt – disinfectant is the best solution.

That’s it! Simple as that.

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