If you keep your bathroom well-cleaned, you shouldn't experience any strange or foul smells. Unfortunately, this sometimes isn't the case when there's an issue with your plumbing. If you think that there's a bad smell coming from your bathtub that you just can't seem to get rid of no matter how many times you clean it, it might be the plumbing itself that you're smelling. Here's what you need to know about tackling this problem.
Tracking the Source
The first thing you should do is check to see if the smell really is coming from the pipes. There's no easier way to do this than taking a sniff. If it seems like the bad smell is coming either from the drain or from a back-up drain, then you've found your culprit and your pipes are to blame.
How it Happens
There are a few reasons why the plumbing attached to your bathtub might smell bad.
The first is the simplest answer — people take showers in your bathtub. The dirt, skin cells, and oil that is washed off the body during a shower or bath goes down the drain, but sometimes it doesn't all get out to the sewer line. Small amounts of skin cells and oil can remain in the drain and cause foul smells.
Another possible way is that you may have experienced a mild back-up from the plumbing attached to your toilet. When a toilet can't flush properly due to a blockage or clog in the sewer line, it can cause the fluid you tried to flush to come up in the bathtub. However, it doesn't need to come up all the way for it to make a pipe smell bad, so you may not have known that this even happened. Unfortunately, whatever was in the toilet when you flushed it may have contaminated the pipe leading from your tub.
Getting Help
The good news is, getting help is as easy as hiring a plumber.
Drain cleaning is the solution that you're looking for. A professional plumber is able to clean a drain with chemicals or just a high-powered water jet that will flush away any blockages, as well as getting rid of anything that's stuck to the sides of the pipe. This will push anything that's smelling foul out of the pipe and into the sewer line, where it'll exit your home and stop stinking up your bathroom. Contact a drain cleaning service today to learn more.
