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Tips for Detecting and Removing a Sewer Gas Smell in Your House

sewage drain

When it comes to having a happy and comfortable home, smell plays an important role! Although the smell isn’t visible and doesn’t impact your home’s aesthetics, having a great home scent is still crucial, as it triggers positive emotions and affects your mood.

Nothing transforms a simple house into a relaxing sanctuary other than the right kind of fragrance—with the right scent, you’ll be able to experience positive emotional and physiological reactions, enhancing your home life and ultimately making the home a wonderful place to be!

Although adding aromatic scents to the house is pretty easy; you can use an essential oil diffuser, scented candle, and spray a room refresher spray to make the space smell amazing. However, maintaining a good home scent can often be difficult because of a variety of factors.

When Your Home Doesn’t Smell Right

In a perfect world, your home would always smell fresh, but this isn’t always the case in reality. Anyone would want to have that fantastic smell that greets you when you walk into the room of a luxury hotel. Unfortunately, making this happen in your own home can seem more challenging than it looks.

Although the smell from your pet, garbage, and dirty clothes can all be handled swiftly, the odor from your toilet or sink isn’t as simple to deal with. If you notice a funky smell whenever you pass by your bathroom, kitchen, or toilet, you might have a sewer gas problem, which may call for a more complicated plan of action.

Causes of Sewer Gas Smell

The smell of sewage isn’t like other odors in your home, as it may indicate a deeper problem that may even cause fires or an explosion, which would require you to call for costly fire restoration. The best way to prevent sewer gas smell is to detect and solve it right away.

Follow these tips in detecting sewer gas smell and how to remove it to avoid any accidents that will require disaster restoration:

1. Inspect Your Water Traps

Water traps can usually be located near floor drains and laundry tubs underneath the sink, which trap water and block gas from traveling to the house. If it dries out, the sewer smell will have a clear path to the sink. 

If the sewer gas smell is coming from the sink, simply run the water for a few seconds. On the other hand, pour a pitcher full of water down the drain if the odor is coming from a floor drain.

 2. Check If Your Clean-Out Plug Is Missing

The clean-out plug prevents sewer gas from escaping into the house, but it can get broken or go missing. Make sure to buy a replacement plug to get rid of the smell.

3. Have an Expert Examine the Sewer or Septic Pipe 

This is one of the more complex causes of sewer gases to solve, as they are more challenging to diagnose and require more expertise to repair. We recommend letting a professional deal with the issue.

4. Let a Plumber Assess the State of Your Sewer Line and Vent Pipe

Loose connections along the sewer line or vent pipe are also a common cause of pungent gases wafting into your home. Since the loose connections will most likely be inside a wall or ceiling, you should leave this job to an experienced plumber.

Conclusion

Sewer gas smell is more than just an unpleasant odor that affects the overall ambiance of the home—depending on what caused it, the smell may indicate a severe problem that can lead to a fire! If you don’t want to experience an unfortunate scenario and have to call for fire damage recovery, make sure to deal with the problem immediately.

Has your home suffered from a fire or explosion? Then, leave it to our team at AAA Restoration to return your house to its original condition! We provide high-quality fire restoration in Utah, involving a methodical approach to ensure prompt action and minimize further damages. Call us at (801) 263-9990 today!