sewage smell inside new home
KelloggBrothers
| Posted in Construction Techniques on
We completed a new home about a year ago. Sometimes when it rains, our client smells a sewage smell in the house. The smell has come from different bathrooms, even ones with a different vent. The smell can also, sometimes, be detected outside. The lot is fairly exposed to the elements.
Does anyone know if there is a way to prevent this. (the clients have made shure that the p-traps are not dry.
Replies
Pleae, if this is a crawl space foundation, check for a leaking drain under the house. Rain will raise the humidity in the crawlspace sometimes to the point of wet which can "reactivate" the residue.
Our church deacons were asked to correct this situation in a elderly widow's house. It was not fun crawling through five years worth of the deposit to get to the elbow that was never correctly connected. Of course, the original plumber--even though licensed--was now out of business; at least under the original business name.
You might try checking all the clean-outs to make sure they have the plugs in them.
I don't know if this applies but here goes.
In some areas of Florida the houses are being put in areas that used to swamp bottoms. They dump in sand and pour a slab over it. The swamp bottom, muck, is still exposed and drying out on the site. Especially the stuff under the sand under the slab.
The sulphur and rotten smell can last for most of a year and return years later during unusually wet or dry conditions. It can come up around the house and often comes through the slab a bit. On the up side it tends to get better and go away in time.
On the down side houses built on muck tend to settle. Mostly OK if it does so evenly. Much more an issue if it is uneven. And then there are sinkholes. Great big house eating sinkholes.
had the same thing here in mass.make sure all the inside drains are working and the traps all have water in them. that means every water collecting drain in the house. My culprit was a 1st floor shower drain. Tell your client to run water in alll drains to make sure they are full of water, and no drain is left unfilled. we did a process of elimination , put a seal over the drains and eliminated them as possible suspects . Our main smell was when we where siting outside, the smell was horrible. I even extended the height of the main stack , because I was afraid the stack was too short and the smell was following the roof outline.
Good luck, Jim Z
Get up on the roof...I bet a vent stack test plug is still there. See it all the time when roofing.
On the latest roof I am on the smell up there was so bad, we had to cap the vents just to hold down our lunch...seems the HO's noticed a new odor and called a plumber to investigate..LOL. We reluctanly informed Mr. Plumber we had the vents capped temporarily.
There ain't a lot of things roofing that really suck worse than trying to solder a vent boot with sewer gas pouring up in yer face. Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks
"We adore chaos, because we love to restore order"
Mauriets Chavailier Escher
I know you said they checked all P-traps, but did they check the clothes washer pan trap. That got my BIL for weeks till he figured it, the best part is, he is a plumber!!!
Yeah, if this is over a crawlspace then most likely some "aromatic" soil under there is getting wet and the odor is coming up through the floor. Also, check to be sure that the plumber actually glued the tailpieces of the P traps in -- I ran into one case where this had never been glued and was just friction-fit.
After that, assuming that the plumbing was properly pressure tested, most likely water is getting into the walls somehow (possibly due to a leaky vent jack) and the odor isn't really from the plumbing.
Oh, yeah -- make sure that the test plugs were removed from the vents. Pressure in the drain lines could cause gas to bubble out of the drains.
No electrons were harmed in the making of this post.
We had the same deal during rain. I figured the barometric change was affecting how gases were moving in the DWV system. It turns out that the wax ring under one of the toilets didn't seal when it was set; lower air pressure caused gas to leak at the ring.
In each bathroom, close the door, put a towel under it to seal the gap, and crank up the exhaust fan. Now check for a draft coming out from under the toilet.
Never had the issue again once this was fixed.
Bruce
Between the mountains and the desert ...