Strange smell in bathroom

si-mate

We've recently moved into a new house and there has always been an unusual smell in the bathroom that we can't quite pinpoint.
I thought initially that it might be due to the septic tank needing desludging, but that was done a few weeks ago and the smell is still there!

When I get chance I'll find a ladder and have a look in the loft to see if anything has died up there. Is there anything else anyone can suggest that might be causing this?

richardc1983

could be many things, you might need to clean ur plug holes, try flushing some caustic soda and boiling water down ur plug holes to flush them out. Could be mould or mildrew?

Steel_2

Sounds similar to what we have in one of our bathrooms.

We tracked it down to the shower plug hole. We think the previous owner installed the shower cubicle and didn't do the angles on the pipework correctly to allow all the water to drain away and also he didn't fit an s-bend. So we have pipes half-filled with water which allows drain smells to come back up the pipes and out, instead of an area of water which completely fills the pipework and blocks the smells coming back.

I've tried putting caustic soda down and various minty or pine smelling liquids.
Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. It comes and goes. if it gets bad, I put a round bottle of shower gel over the top to block the plug hole off when the shower's not in use.

Canucklehead

Hi

Where does the overflow from the cistern go ? (If it has one)

Corgi Guy.

jackomdj

Another possibility....do you have any plants? We had a spider plant, we had it for years. Bathroom started smelling & we cleaned toilet, both, sink, looked in loft & eventually discovered that the plant had died & the roots were rotting!
HTH
Nicky

andrew-b

If your radiator has convector fins on the back get a special radiator brush (betterware sell them) and clean them out - helped remove similar strange smells from our bathroom.

Other places we had to clean before smells disappeared in our bathroom were round the back of the pedestal of the washbasin and also a gap between bottom of the toilet cistern and the wall.

Clean everything you can think of and see if it make any difference

Andy

si-mate

Thanks for all the suggestions.

No plants in there yet so thats not it!

I'll have a go at the radiator with the hoover and a stick!

Don't know about the cistern overflow. The toilet isn't mounted on an external wall so it obviously doesn't go straight outside. I'll have a look and let you know.

I've got some caustic soda so I'll give all the plug holes a go with that.

It wouldn't surprise me if the pipework isn't done properly. The property was developed 4 years ago and to see it you would think it had been done 10 years ago.

Myrtle

I've had this too recently.

Yesterday I had the day off so I got down on my hands and knees to give the floor round the toilet a good scrub/bleach. While I was down there I noticed that right up under the rim of the loo was a disgusting looking brown gunge
BARF :eek: :eek: :eek:

The loo gets cleaned several times a week but I guess not far enough up - it was further than the loo brush could get. I scrubbed it clean with a old tooth brush and "bob's yer uncle" no more manky smell. I keep wandering in there to have a sniff :rotfl:

27col

The trap on the shower tray is normally very shallow and in our case a disused shower started to smell. The problem is that the water in the trap evaporates, and this is what lets the drains smells up into the room. As this shower tray is in a room which used to be a self contained flat, but has now been converted back into a hobby room, the shower is not used and thus the water trap is not kept full of water. We have to pour a pint of water into it every couple of weeks. This has eliminated the problem.

si-mate

We hadn't been there for a few days so when I went in I could smell it, but I don't know if it went, or I got used to it, but I couldn't locate it. I sniffed each plug hole and they smell fresh. I took the lid of the cistern (no overflow) and that smelt fine. The radiator smells a little musty so I'll have a go at that. The extractor is filthy but couldn't detect any scent.
I even pulled back a bit of the bath panel and couldn't smell anything there.

I guess the next step will have to be the loft :eek:

Mutton_Geoff

I had a flat with the same problem. In the end it was as Canucklehead suggests, a problem with the cistern overflow. Whoever installed it had plumbed it straight into the soil pipe so sewer smells were venting back up through the pipe

After I'd installed a new bathroom (with overflow feeding straight into pan in new model), problem went.