]My problem started with a foul odor in my dishwasher. I have had all the venting in the house checked and the builder states that there is not a problem. I had the house built six years ago. This problem started about five months ago.
The odor I am narrowing down to, I do believe, the sludge in all of my pipes. My single stall shower has a fairly large drain and that is where you can really see it without removing any pipes. The black gunk is just horrible. We tore the pipes apart under the kitchen sink where the dishwasher drains into and every pipe had about a quarter inch thick of sludge on them. I did scrub them well but you can only reach so far into the drain system. I got Drano and then poured it down all of my drains to include the washing machine drain. I used the Drano on Saturday. Today when I ran a load of laundry, in the bottom of the washing machine, I found some of this loosened sludge! How this can happen is beyond me, but that is what I found. Not a lot but even just a bit that I found, would lead me to believe that that same stuff could get into my dish washer and cause the odor. The odor on my dishes when the dishwasher has completed it's cycles... is a sour smell. Quite strong I might add. I have public water. I guess my question at this point is this... should my drains have all this black gunk in them? Something I should add to this. The pipes under the kitchen sink, where the water runs through the pipes... that had no sludge... it was above the water line that the sludge was all built up. If this is a normal occurrence... should I be doing some type of maintenance on them to keep this from building up so horribly. I did scrub all of the pipes and ran the dishwasher after and had no odor, but, time will tell as to if the odor returns. Any help or comments are welcome as this is a very frustrating situation I am in.
In the beginning of this post I added that the venting system was checked out. The reason for this.. one of the vent pipes on the top of the house had actually dropped down about a foot. No straps were ever put on the vent pipes when the house was built, and so the builder did come out and strap them up and reposition the pipe to it's original spot. He did check out the rest of the vents and said that everything was fine.
I am not sure if that information even pertains to what is going on but at this point all of the facts are important I feel in determining the situation.
Thank you in advance for any help anyone can give me.
Tina