Todo es normal. It's become our in-joke whenever we have a problem at the house, or the tax office, or the electric company, or anywhere, it seems, we're having a problem. It's because we've lost track of how many times we've been told that after telling someone we've recently paid that we are having a problem with the thing for which we paid them. Whether it's a purchase or a service, when you have a problem with something, the first thing you'll usually hear is, "Oh, that's normal."
Take, for instance, shortly after we moved in to the house we bought. We actually bought the place last year, but we've spent the last year renovating it. That's a story for another time. Anyways, we finally moved in at the end of June. And the first morning we woke up in our new house... it smelled like a combination of poop and rotten eggs.
Turns out it was sewer gases, coming from the shower drain. But when we told the contractor about it?
"Es normal."
Like, really? It's normal for my bathroom to smell like a frat-house refrigerator at the end of the semester? Like, instead of a toilet, we had a port-o-let installed? I've moved a lot since I left home, and I've never known that to be normal.
"Oh yes, in Madrid, if people go away for a few weeks in the summer, when they return home it's typical for the house to smell until you air it out."
Great. Except that this wasn't after a few weeks. It was after a single night. Every night.
It turned out that it really wasn't normal. The problem was a combination of issues: first, the trap installed in the shower wasn't deep enough. In case you're not familiar with them, it is common to have a piece of plumbing installed in the drain of a shower, toilet, or sink that uses water to "trap" the naturally-occurring sewer gases and keep them from coming back out of the drain. (That actually es normal.) Under the sink, it's that curved piece of pipe at the bottom of the drain, and in the U.S. it might be called a "j-trap" or a "p-trap", because the pipe is shaped like the letter "j", or like a letter "p" laying on it's face (or maybe just because it's supposed to trap the smell of pee before it gets into your bathroom.)
In a shower, the trap is typically shaped like a bowl with a smaller bowl inside of it. Regardless of the shape, though, the function is the same: the trap uses water to keep sewer gases from coming back out of the drain by acting as a one-way valve.
So, back to the issue at hand: the trap in a shower is not, as a rule, very deep because it has to fit under the shower pan (the "floor" of the shower that keeps water from running out when you're actually using it). And because it was so bloody hot inside--due first to it being July, and second to our air conditioner being on backorder--the water in the trap would evaporate overnight. It didn't help that it's so dry in Madrid. Even if we took a shower at night, resulting in the trap getting filled with water, by morning all of that water had evaporated, freeing the gases to enter the bathroom.
So there it was: a shallow trap; too much heat and too dry a climate; overnight evaporation; and voila: poop and rotten eggs.
Fortunately, it turns out there's a solution. In older bathrooms, builders used to install a "whole-bathroom trap". This was a water trap that was usually less susceptible to the water evaporating out of it because it would be set into the floor and thus not so exposed to the air. Historically, this was done for most bathrooms because, historically, there was no air conditioning. Since everyone had to suffer with heat, evaporating water and sewer gases were more common. So someone figured out that they could solve the problem by putting an extra piece of curvy pipe--basically a j-trap--in the drainpipe taking all of the water away from the bathroom. Since air conditioning has become more common, however, the extra trap has gone out of fashion. For one thing, it's an extra piece of plumbing that has to be installed, meaning the bathroom floor has to be designed in such a way to allow extra space for it. For another, because it's a curvy piece of pipe, it's easier for clogs to happen there. And because it's under the floor, if you can't unclog it with a drain-snake down the toilet, well... get ready to rip up your bathroom floor. So, since people could add a water trap for each fixture (toilet, shower or tub, sink, bidet), which was both effective and a lot easier to unclog, the "whole-bathroom trap" went out of fashion.
Still, this elegant old solution proved it is still relevant: At the plumber's suggestion, we had him install a secondary trap under the floor of the bathroom. Fortunately, our bathroom is situated above the kitchen stairs. I know what you're thinking--You'd better hope your toilet never floods--and you're right, I do hope that. But the bathroom isn't one the whole kitchen, just the stairs. And thanks to this, the plumber was fairly easily able to go through the ceiling above those stairs (and below the shower) to access the drain pipe. And since we also had him put a little trap-door in the ceiling underneath where the drain is located, should we ever really need to, we can access the trap without having to tear up the bathroom floor.
So anyhow, that's how we got rid of the nasty sewer gas smell, and now waking up and not smelling that stink es la nueva normalidad.
