A plumbing system is a complex item in your home or business that carries clean water to your plumbing fixtures and eliminates waste through separate lines from your structure.
How the Plumbing Works
Your plumbing is a series of pipes, traps and vents to carry off liquid and solid waste. Each of your plumbing fixtures, such as sinks, showers, floor drains and toilets are connected to pipes to carry the wastewater away from your home or business. This system is created with vents and traps to keep sewer gases and odors from entering your home.
How Do Vents and Traps Work
The traps are placed underneath each of your plumbing fixtures. They can be “P” or “S” shaped and they hold water in the curves of the pipes so that they form an airlock and don’t allow odors to rise into your home or business. Each trap requires a vent on the top of your home or business to provide a liquid seal to keep smells out. The sewer smells travel upward into the vents on the roof instead of coming into your plumbing fixtures through pressure equalization to aid in drainage and let the gases escape into the air. Vents also add atmospheric pressure to enter to prevent a backpressure from forming when water fills the pipes.
What do I do Now?
There is a mass amount of reasons that can lead to foul odors from your plumbing. It is best to call for sewer line repair Kansas City to let a professional diagnose your system. It can be that your traps or vents are cracked or not operating correctly and they are letting smells inside. You can check to see if your toilet seal is broken by gently rocking your toilet bowl from one side to the other. If the toilet bowl rocks, then the seal needs replacing so that is most likely where the smells are coming from.
If your traps are leaking near the joints it can cause foul smells. It can leak smelly water down underneath the trap and into a kitchen or bathroom cabinet under the sink. Any drip over time may become worse and lead to a dry trap, which will allow odors into your home or business.
Bathroom sinks have a drain hole near the top lip to keep the sink from overfilling and spilling onto the floor. This drain hole can hold debris inside of it and collect odors to release into your home or business.
Other areas that need to be examined include leaks in the vent lines, loose fittings or connections, holes in vent piping or corrosion of pipes.
Your best bet is to leave this to the professionals for sewer line repair Kansas City as soon as you smell an odor and before it becomes a larger disaster.
