To get rid of smelly bathroom drains, try these simple steps:
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Pour 1/2 cup of baking soda down the drain, followed by 1 cup of white vinegar123. Let the mixture sit for at least a few minutes to allow the chemical reaction to loosen any debris and neutralize odors.
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Pour a kettle full of boiling water down the drain after the baking soda and vinegar mixture has had time to work23. This helps wash away any gunk and can make your drains smell fresh again.
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If the smell persists, use a plunger to help loosen any more substantial blockages23. Repeat the baking soda, vinegar, and boiling water treatment until the odor is gone.
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As a last resort, use a drain snake or straightened wire coat hanger to manually remove any remaining debris3.
To prevent smelly drains in the future:
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Avoid letting too much hair go down the drain2
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Use taps regularly to keep traps hydrated and functioning properly2
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Pour boiling water and/or a vinegar and baking soda solution down drains regularly23
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Install hair catchers in your drains3
If home remedies don't work, it's best to contact a professional plumber to identify and treat the cause of the odor, which could be a blocked sewer line, faulty vent pipe, or other plumbing issue2.
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Author: HouseBarons
Key insights
️ Cleaning the trap and removing accumulated gunk can solve the smelly drain problem in sinks and showers.
The smallest inside diameter portion of the drain is about one and three quarters inch, making it important to find the right tool for cleaning.
The flexible shaft on the brush is crucial for reaching and cleaning the trap area in the drain effectively.
Running a cleaning brush up and down the drain can effectively scrub the walls and eliminate the smell.
Regular scrubbing and rinsing are essential to effectively tackle the smell problem in the drain.
Using a mixture of baking soda and vinegar is an effective way to clean out the gunk in a smelly drain.
Fizzing the drain cleaner can help break down and eliminate odors in the drain.
Regular maintenance can keep everything in good condition.
Timestamped Summary
00:00 Remove debris and accumulated hair from sink or shower drain to get rid of bad smell.
01:02 Use a tape measure to find the smallest inside diameter of the drain, then use a paint roller soaked in water, vinegar, and baking soda to clean it.
01:38 Use a flexible brush to clean the trap in the shower or sink drain to get rid of the buildup.
02:17 Use a long cleaning brush to scrub the walls of the drain as far down as possible for a thorough clean.
02:47 Clean the drain by scrubbing and rinsing to remove the smell.
03:42 Use a mixture of baking soda and vinegar to clean out the gunk in the drain that can't be reached with a brush.
04:53 Pour fizzing cleaner down the drain, let it work, then rinse with hot water to keep odors away.
05:31 Clean your drain every three months to prevent smells and repeat the process regularly for best results.
Video Full Text
00:00 Hey this is dave from healthparents.com if you ever had that problem where you get a really bad smell coming from either your sink drain or your shower drain. We're going to show you how to get rid of that to start off you got to get access to the drain and so we've already taken the screws out from this that gets you to the source of the problem. A couple of videos back we showed you how to replace the sink drain in the tube that comes from the drain to the trap and in doing so. We also removed the p-trap the curved part of the drain pipe and the the straight section that went into the wall and in doing so. We found a lot of debris in there and a lot of just accumulated hair and gunk that happens to almost any sink drain and that's what we're really trying to get at here. Today the problem is is in a sink. It's very easy to get to the trap and remove that and clean that out. The shower drain is a little more difficult. So we're going to take that on today but the process is very very much the same.
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01:02 What we have here is a sink drain that the smallest inside diameter you just take a tape measure and kind of just line it up and look at it. The smallest inside diameter portion of the drain that we have is about one and three quarters inch so our goal was to find something that we could use uh to get down in there. A common way of doing it is taking a paint roller and soaking it with water vinegar baking soda and the like and running it in that tube. But we want to go farther than just the straight tube before it gets to the trap and since we have a basement and a finished ceiling.
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01:38 Below this. We can't get to that trap from below so we're gonna attack it from inside. We really have a two-step process and our first part of it is to get a brush like this and we're amazon affiliates. We'll put a link in the description below to get this. They're a little bit hard to find this. Brush is two and a quarter inches across and about five or six inches long and the most important part is it has a flexible shaft on it so that it'll bend once it goes into that trap area. We want to try to get it down there as far as we possibly can to get rid of all the the buildup that is on the inside of the pipe and low into the trap all right.
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02:17 So the first thing we want to do is take our our cleaning brush and put it down into the pipe and just run it up and down as you go deeper and deeper and what it's doing is just scrubbing the walls of that drain and the further you can get it the better that's the reason we bought such a long brush and one that uh that has a bigger diameter than the pipe is so that we're getting a good scrub as far down as possible and you can see be careful. When you pull this up.
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02:47 It splatters everywhere but you can see there's it's getting way way deep and bringing up just a ton of gunk and so we're going to do this a couple times and it smells it and but that's a good news because you know you're going somewhere with it. Let's bring it up slowly when you're done you can see there's been quite a bit of scrubbing there and all of that is part of the smell problem and so we're going to rinse that out first and then go to step two all right before we rinse it out. I'm just going to scrub on this top section. That's wider than the diameter of the brush all right so let's rinse this up a bit.
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03:42 All right now. We'll go one more time same thing all right and already. You can see that there's a lot less of the gunk than we had the first time so we're getting a pretty good clean out of it again rinse it off. Now we want to get to step two and step two is to uh deal with stuff that we can't literally reach with this brush. We're gonna use a mixture of baking soda which is a great drain cleaner. So we're just going to do a couple spoonfuls of this couple. Scoops of that into the drain and then we'll follow it up with vinegar into that and you'll hear it.
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04:53 Fizz right as you pour it in and we'll just let that fizz and work a while and we're going to come back and I'm going to go get some hot water not boiling water. A lot of times you'll read people you'll hear people say use boiling water if you have metal metal drain. Pipes boiling water is fine but with plastic we're going to go a little easy on that and so we'll just do hot hot water but uh not boiling all right so here's hot water if you want to make sure that drain smells and the odor that comes from that is kept at bay.
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05:31 Then it's a good idea to do this every three months or so just to stay on top of it. And if you do it regularly everything should be good just for the sake of repetition. We'll go ahead and do that process one more time. Just real quickly well that's it hope this video helps. If you got anything out of us give thumbs up. We appreciate it don't forget to subscribe. We'll see you next time.
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