Put This In Your Sink Before Vacationing To Keep Bad Smells Away

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It's bad enough when your vacation is over, but returning home to a kitchen sink that smells less than pleasant can really be a bummer. Sure, you can try various sprays in an attempt to cover up the odor, but the most effective path is prevention. 

There's an easy way to make sure those undesired smells never form in your sink to begin with, and it takes just seconds. Add this to your list of kitchen tasks to do before leaving on holiday. Just fill a glass with cold water and pour it down the drain. Then, take a dampened paper towel and use it to cover the drain. Next, go enjoy your getaway and return home to an odor-free kitchen.

See, the reason your kitchen sink can smell gross even when you clean it regularly — especially if you're away from home for a bit — is because its whole system is designed to hold a little bit of water in that U-shaped section of the pipe underneath. The point is actually to keep even worse smells at bay, as this water creates a seal against sewer gases that could otherwise travel up the pipe into your sink. But when you're not home, running water regularly, that water starts to evaporate and cause its own odors, and residue in the pipes dries out and smells, too. The paper towel helps keep things moist, prolonging that evaporation, and also creates a light barrier.

Usually, these kitchen sink smells are as easy to fix as employing the paper towel trick, and then running the tap for maybe a minute as soon as you return home to flush out the pipes and restore that little seal against sewer gases. But if you're heading out of town for a longer period of time, or have found those sink odors especially stubborn in the past, there are extra steps you can take. For example, you can drop a teaspoon of Materialix food-grade mineral oil down the drain, which coats that little reserve of water and slows down its evaporation. 

There are many ways to clean your kitchen with baking soda — the same absorbent properties that make baking soda effective in those cases work here, too. Pour one cup into the drain, wait about 15 minutes, then pour up to a ½ cup of vinegar down. Wait another 15 minutes — this is when the mixture is bubbling up, cutting through residue with its acid and soaking it up with its absorbency. You then flush it with a good amount of hot water and bid the drain's bacteria adieu. If you have a garbage disposal, gently scrub down the drain with a long brush and warm, soapy water, then pour down a water-and-vinegar mixture and flush with cold water. These methods will clean your kitchen sink drain perfectly in general, and they're especially helpful before vacations.