Unless your garbage can smell like rotten eggs, your kitchen sink is probably the source of that horrible smell. Even if you studiously use a garbage disposal or sink strainer, you work your kitchen sink drains intensely. The grease, multiple food particles, or even hair inevitably make their way into the drain and create a foul smell, making your kitchen smell like a sewer. Check out the possible reason why your kitchen sink smells badly and how you can get rid of that smell.
How to Avoid a Smelly Kitchen?
If you haven’t found out why a terrible smell comes from your kitchen sink, here are a couple of possible reasons:
1. You haven’t cleaned your pipe for a long while
… or never. What was the last time you thoroughly cleaned your drain? A month, a year, or years ago? Your kitchen sink might work well, but the pipes might need a bubble bath to stay clear and eliminate any odor coming from them. Check out your drain or clean it at least once a month, depending on how often you cook. However, make sure you clean your pipe right without using too harsh cleaners. The natural drain cleaner is mentioned below.
2. You have no garbage disposal
Having a garbage disposal is one of the simplest ways to prevent a horrible smell coming out of your sink. But sometimes, we’re so tired and exhausted at the end of the day that we have our dinners and throw those dishes with food particles into the sink.
Sure, those particles of food are tiny and can easily make their way down the drain without any problems. However, the bigger particles often stay stuck in the drain. Over time, the remaining particles of the food start to stagnate, resulting in horrible smell coming out from the sink.
If you don’t have a garbage disposal, you not only risk getting a lingering bad kitchen sink smell, but you risk clogging your drain. The next time you eat your dinner, remove any remaining scraps, and throw them away into your garbage can. If you want to avoid a smelly kitchen, sprinkle some baking soda down your drain at least once a week. If you’re going or flying somewhere abroad and you want to keep your sink odor-free, a sprinkle of baking soda will do the trick.
How to Remove the Bad Smell in Your Kitchen Sink
If you don’t have a garbage disposal, here are a few tricks on how to fight that horrible odor coming from your sink:
- The popular trick of using boiling water, vinegar, and baking soda to remove the bad sink drain smells still works. Prepare 2 cups of vinegar and a cup of baking soda. Pour out the baking soda into the drain and add vinegar to it. It’ll greatly bubble up, so don’t be afraid. Leave it for 3 minutes and either run hot water or pour a lot of boiling water (one to two kettles.) If you need to break up the gunk, add 1/2 cup of coarse salt to the baking soda.
- If you run out of vinegar, you can try the boiling water, lemon juice, and baking soda to clean your sink drain. Unlike vinegar, lemon juice offers fantastic cleansing properties and smells better than vinegar.
- Hot vinegar is another trick to try. Consider using the hot vinegar to wash at least a cup of baking soda down the pipe.
- If you have nothing but water, boil a lot of it and pour it down your sink to clean the drain. Boiling water won’t remove the odor, but it can reduce it.
If you have a garbage disposal, here’s how you can clean it:
- Lemon and vinegar ice cubes. Freeze several lemon wedges in vinegar and crush it in the disposal. Pop a couple of these ice cubes down the disposal to fight the sink odor and ward off the new one.
- Lemons peels, coarse salt, and ice cubes. Keep the disposal blades clear and clean of lingering funky food particles with three simple ingredients. You can also keep a few ice cubes made of hot water and lemon peels handy.
- Lemon and vinegar ice cubes. When other cleaning methods fail, try out the powerful combination of lemon and vinegar ice cubes.
Before you invest in expensive and chemical-packed products that promise you to clear your kitchen sink and get rid of any odor, try out natural methods. Also, remember prevention is the best treatment.
