14 year old house. This problem is in one bathroom only and it is the
one on the north side of the house. Very cold climate. When it is
really cold and you flush the toilet, you hear gurgling sounds from the
sink, Jacuzzi, and shower. Unless you turn on all the taps and let the
water run for about 2 minutes (real pain in the middle of the night),
the bathroom starts smelling like a sewer and permeates the whole house
if you don't catch it in time, I am guessing this is methane gas? We
thought the vent could be blocked so we have in the past poured water
down the vent and it did not seem to be blocked. Can anyone out there
help?

wrote:

14 year old house. This problem is in one bathroom only and it is the
one on the north side of the house. Very cold climate. When it is
really cold and you flush the toilet, you hear gurgling sounds from the
sink, Jacuzzi, and shower. Unless you turn on all the taps and let the
water run for about 2 minutes (real pain in the middle of the night),
the bathroom starts smelling like a sewer and permeates the whole house
if you don't catch it in time, I am guessing this is methane gas? We
thought the vent could be blocked so we have in the past poured water
down the vent and it did not seem to be blocked. Can anyone out there
help?


Does the odor only occur in freezing weather?
If so, the vent connection is probably freezing up.
But what to do? Short term, maybe run a hose
to the roof terminal and run hot water down the vent.

Long term, you'd have to investigate how the drains and vent
are routed. Does it look like they might be in the
exterior wall?

It's also possible that there is some solid substance
blocking the vent connection to the sink/tub.
That could be *very* tricky to snake out without
at least some disruption to the wall.

Jim

wrote in message
oups.com...

14 year old house. This problem is in one bathroom only and it is the
one on the north side of the house. Very cold climate. When it is
really cold and you flush the toilet, you hear gurgling sounds from the
sink, Jacuzzi, and shower. Unless you turn on all the taps and let the
water run for about 2 minutes (real pain in the middle of the night),
the bathroom starts smelling like a sewer and permeates the whole house
if you don't catch it in time, I am guessing this is methane gas? We

Learn the sewerage system as a whole . . .
1. Each house's waste pipe network has at least one
"stack vent" to the outside (usually up through the roof)
to dissipate smells.
2. Efficient operation of this system requires at
least a gentle breeze. During cold spells in the
Canadian winter there is often no breeze at all --
so the smell-dispersion system does not work as
designed. (This happens here about once every
winter for a three-day period.)
3. It is unusual for the sewage gas smell to be
concentrated in any one room. Gravity causes
sewage gases to fall towards ground level so (in
time) smell is worst in the basement -- but generally
throughout the house and outdoors as well, not
concentrated iin any one room.

Ask your neighbours if they have the same problem.
We do, and I planned to fit rotating turbine exhaust
covers on the vent stacks when the house was reroofed,
but plumbing suppliers had none to fit.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

Don Phillipson wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...

14 year old house. This problem is in one bathroom only and it is the
one on the north side of the house. Very cold climate. When it is
really cold and you flush the toilet, you hear gurgling sounds from the
sink, Jacuzzi, and shower. Unless you turn on all the taps and let the
water run for about 2 minutes (real pain in the middle of the night),
the bathroom starts smelling like a sewer and permeates the whole house
if you don't catch it in time, I am guessing this is methane gas? We

Learn the sewerage system as a whole . . .
1. Each house's waste pipe network has at least one
"stack vent" to the outside (usually up through the roof)
to dissipate smells.
2. Efficient operation of this system requires at
least a gentle breeze. During cold spells in the
Canadian winter there is often no breeze at all --
so the smell-dispersion system does not work as
designed. (This happens here about once every
winter for a three-day period.)
3. It is unusual for the sewage gas smell to be
concentrated in any one room. Gravity causes
sewage gases to fall towards ground level so (in
time) smell is worst in the basement -- but generally
throughout the house and outdoors as well, not
concentrated iin any one room.

Ask your neighbours if they have the same problem.
We do, and I planned to fit rotating turbine exhaust
covers on the vent stacks when the house was reroofed,
but plumbing suppliers had none to fit.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

"Maggie" wrote in
ups.com:


Thanks for writing in Don, the wierd thing is that it only
happens in 1 of our 2 bathrooms, the one on the north side wall.
None of our neighbors have this same problem. We have a septic
field as we are outside city limits, we have a wood basement
with a crawl space underneath, but this cannot be the problem
because it is only in the 1 bathroom that we have the backup
smell. And as I said, if you run water in either the shower or
the Jacuzzi, the smell disipates. If, you do not use the
toilet...there is no problem...but that doesn't always work out,
because you don't know it's going to happen until you flush the
toilet and hear that gurgel in the pipes.



Regardless of anything else, the trap built in to every commode,
and installed in the drain line of every sink and tub is there for
the express purpose of sealing that drain line so that NO vapors
can enter the area from the sewer lines. I know this will not be a
happy job, but try to see WHICH drain the methane gas is coming
from when it appears - the lav, the tub, the commode, or somewhere
else.

The other purpose of the stack vents is to make sure that there is
no possibility of any suction from drain activity somewhere else in
the house pulling water out of those traps, thus keeping them from
performing their duty. It may be that moisture venting from the
sewer lines is freezing in the stack vent for that bathrooms
commode, thus allowing under certain conditions the water to be
sucked out of one of the traps in that bathroom, thus undoing the
seal and allowing methane from the sewer line into the area. I
would expect any such blockage to be of the "rhime frost" type that
would be only temporary, thus frustrating your efforts to find it
later.