Baking soda and vinegar went down the kitchen drain. Dish soap followed. After letting everything sit, hot water ran through the pipe. The smell remained.
Reddit user u/FrodoBaggins4321 had moved into an apartment with a kitchen sink that smelled bad from the drain. A dirty dishwasher connected to the drainage system raised another question: was the drain itself dirty, or was the odor coming from somewhere else?
Commenters kept pointing her in one direction before she poured anything else down the sink: underneath it.
The next check was the drain hose
One commenter suggested looking at the drainage hoses below the sink for a kink or another problem that could keep them from emptying.
Water may leave while food solids or other debris remain behind in the line. Instead of adding another cleaner, the advice was to inspect whether the pipes and hoses were draining as intended.
That mattered here because the dishwasher was connected to the sink drain. The dishwasher itself also smelled and had buildup left by previous tenants.
Then commenters pointed to the P-trap
Attention also turned to the curved section of pipe under the sink.
A P-trap holds water inside its bend. One commenter explained that this water creates a barrier between the room and odors coming from farther down the drainage system. If a trap dries out, running water can refill it.
Another possibility was material sitting inside the trap itself.
One commenter suggested that food waste could collect there, sit in the pipe, and produce an odor. The homeowner decided cleaning the P-trap would be part of her next attempt.
Another homeowner found the mess only after taking the drain apart
One response came from someone who had dealt with a similar smell.
They said they had tried multiple methods before taking the drain apart and cleaning it. What they found inside was bad enough to surprise them after only two years of use.
Another commenter reported the same kind of outcome: drain cleaner and deodorizer hadn’t solved the odor. Cleaning the P-trap and removing a layer of scum from the pipes did.
Those experiences don’t prove the original poster had the same problem, but they explain why commenters wanted her to inspect the plumbing instead of repeating the same drain-cleaning routine.
Baking soda and vinegar had already failed
The familiar fizzy combination wasn’t the breakthrough in this case.
The homeowner had already used baking soda and vinegar before asking for help. One commenter pointed out that combining the two produces a reaction and suggested a drain snake instead of continuing to pour products into the pipe.
Another commenter recommended a foaming drain cleaner, arguing that water doesn’t reach every surface inside the upper part of a drain pipe.
The thread never establishes which method fixed the original sink.
The dishwasher couldn’t be ruled out either
Because the dishwasher shared the drainage system, commenters also considered its drain hose.
One suggested that old food or stagnant water inside the dishwasher line could produce an odor detectable through the sink drain. Running the dishwasher might flush the line if that were the source.
The homeowner later confirmed that her dishwasher connected to the sink drain and said she planned to clean the dishwasher, its filter, the pipes, and the P-trap before deciding what came next.
No final diagnosis appears in the discussion, so there isn’t evidence that one dirty P-trap caused her problem.
What the thread changed was where she looked. After baking soda, vinegar, dish soap, and hot water failed, the next step wasn’t another substance poured through the drain opening. It was checking the hoses, trap, dishwasher connection, and buildup hiding under the sink.
When a kitchen drain keeps smelling after you clean it, do you check the plumbing underneath?
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