smelly drains and mildewy shower curtains

Blacksheep1979

Pretty much as the title - any home brew remedies to these problems? Tried bleach etc with the drains but they still pong a bit.

Any pointers greatly appreciated.

whatatwit

Is it the drain in the bath/shower....it may be a build up of hair and soap.
Try having a poke with a skewer if you can't get underneath to remove the u-bend.
Also, does it drain to an outside open grid, that may be where the smell is coming from...a cat used to pee in our outside grid and the smell would travel up the pipe.
Zoflora is good for making drains smell better.

For the shower curtain, try and leave it opened out to dry after you have showered. You may need to give it a good scrub first to get rid of the mildew...although it is a beggar to shift.

buyitall

Not very eco-friendly, but I now buy the cheaper shower curtains - the VERY cheap ones are less than a pound from Asda/Tesco - and then replace them with new ones when necessary. I do wash the old ones, but find that they never come up spotlessly clean. Once washed, they can be re-used for things like dustsheets when decorating etc.

rheme

Put the shower curtain in the washer along with a couple of old towels and use your normal detergent. This should clean it up.

Pink.

Hi Blacksheep,

These older threads might help:

Drain cleaner?

Mouldy shower curtain


Pink

belfastgirl23

Someone recommended to me soaking the shower curtains in tesco non bio which did seem to help. Also took a bit of scrubbing and an application of vanish to get it back to a decent shape. Last time I did mine I washed them with a load of towels which seemed to bring them up really well for some reason.

It is also really important once clean to dry them thoroughly after use.

lil_me

Eucalyptus oil is good for mildew

Drains - if you are bleaching a lot and it's still there it might be worth getting the pipes off and giving them a good clean, or get someone who knows what they are doing to.

http://completediy.ukrivers.net/#plumbing some good info on there under drains and drainage

Being careful as to what you put down the sinks etc is usually a good way to prevent the nasty niffs, making sure any food waste goes in the bin inc fats etc (composting what you can of course) water that food has cooked in even usually has bits in so try a seive to remove this, or just throw the water over your plants outside like my gran used to do :rotfl: once it cooled of course.

You can get various drain cleaning chemicals, inc jeyes etc, many people just use caustic soda which a lot of them have in anyway, usually cheaper and can be bought from places like £ shops etc

computerwoman

I bought my shower curtains 15 years ago from boyes with it's own tie-back I just stick it in the washer with some towels to up the load and hey presto it's clean...as for drains I had this problem in the summer used everything known to man jeyes fluid worked the best but I had to do it loads of times and take the grate off stick in a bucket soak and scrub then get the hose pipe and flush any muck away about 10 minutes down the drain on high power...that should stop it...a solution of bicar of soda or soda crystals work well as well...hth's...:D