On Thursday, January 23, 2014 7:44:53 PM UTC-5, Steven L. wrote:
My kitchen disposal is giving off this bad musty odor. And it's murder

on my sinuses. Every time I go near that thing, my nose stuffs up. I

know the odor is coming out of there, because if I cover the disposal,

the odor goes away--but the moment I uncover it, the smell is there.



I cleaned the disposal but the smell remained. Even using full strength

Clorox only kills the odor for a couple of days, after which the odor

returns. There's some black gunk under the rim of the disposal. I

scrub it off and bleach that area, but the gunk returns in 48 hours.



So now I'm wondering if there's decaying material either under the

rotating plate of the disposal, or perhaps even deeper into the drain

pipe, from which bugs keep growing. I tried Liquid-Plumr to dislodge

any gunk in the drain, and the drain flows freely. But that didn't help

the odor either. Or maybe there's bad stuff in the dishwasher drain

hose that feeds into the disposal???



Any ideas?



Before I replace the disposal, I want to be sure the problem is there

and not in the drain itself.





--

Steven L.

Ours did that. I discovered that the pipes below it had a horizontal clean out stub that sloped slightly the wrong way. Over the years bits of waste had accumulated in that short section of pipe until it was full of a brown smelly sludge. Seems those bacteria would quickly infest the trap water and start smelling bad. Even if I ran a bunch of hot soapy water down it, only a few hours later the stink would be back. Apparently the workers had a hard time getting the cabinet in and had pushed the drain pipe some coming up from the floor to make it all fit. That caused the clean out slope to be wrong. I cut the drain pipe out, cleaned it all, and reinstalled with the proper slopes and the problem went away.