Dishwasher Smells Like Rotten Eggs/Sewage! How We Fixed a Smelly Dishwasher
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“Eww, Mom farted!”
“It’s not me. The dishwasher smells like rotten eggs and is stinking up the kitchen again,” I reply as I sigh and roll my eyes for the billionth time. And by dishwasher, I don’t mean me.
If your dishwasher smells like rotten eggs too, you might be surprised at what a potentially easy fix this is. Alas, as is sometimes often the case, we learned this the hard way.
Here’s our smelly Kenmore culprit:
“It wasn’t me, I swear. The dishwasher smells like rotten eggs.”
If you find yourself telling your kids this same thing, read on. There are numerous reasons a dishwasher stinks like sewage when it runs. You could have a problem with the location of your drain, your lack of high loop, your thermostat, or your drain tube.
We noticed a rotten egg, sewage-like, stench emanating from our smelly dishwasher not long after we moved into our home several years ago. At first, my husband and I playfully blamed it on each other. Then, it became so disgustingly similar to a fart smell, I had to get the heck out of Dodge every time I turned the thing on. The dishwasher, not the husband.
Things I tried to clean the dishwasher with, but to no avail:
- dishwasher cleaner
- lemonade Kool-Aid pouches
- vinegar
- baking soda
- Lemon Shine
- vinegar + baking soda
- Bar Keeper’s Friend
Nothing worked, and the smell grew more pungent with each load. We gave up and dealt with it for months and months. Sound familiar?
Luckily, the smelly dishwasher finally broke beyond repair and the control panel it needed wasn’t worth the cost. Thanks, Kenmore! My cheap self wouldn’t normally think that’s lucky, but I was tired of that sewage smell in my kitchen every time I ran the dishwasher! I was happy to get a replacement dishwasher and even happier to quit being the “butt” of everyone’s fart jokes. This solved our stinky problem…for several months.
But then it came back in the next dishwasher.
More powerful than ever before.
Here is actual footage of me after I start the dishwasher each night:
Steps to consider when the dishwasher smells like rotten eggs (#4 is what fixed ours)
1. Make sure you have a high loop
I knew nothing about dishwashers before this stinky debacle. But this site helped me learn quite a bit, including the necessity of the high loop. Make sure you got one, and that it’s in the correct location relative to the P-trap–in between the P-trap and dishwasher. Also make sure there is water in your P-trap and no obstructions or leaks, otherwise you might be getting sewage gas stench coming up through your pipes. Yikes! If you suspect you have a sewage gas leak, call a plumber!
Here’s a great place for a disclaimer: I’m not a plumber, and nothing in this article should be construed as professional advice. I’m just sharing a smelly experience.
This site gives a great summary of how to treat a p-trap problem, although I’ve read mixed reviews about the boiling water solution. I tried it with my sink, and while it didn’t hurt my pipes, it also didn’t fix my problem.
Newer dishwashers have a high-loop built-in on the side but most posters agree you need another one anyway.
The good news is the “loop” isn’t anything hard to do. It can really be more of a high hill than a loop. Just bring that hose upward as much as you can under the sink. Many homes have a high hole where the dishwasher drain hose enters into the under-sink area, and running the hose through that hole creates a high loop. If you don’t have that high hole, get an EMT clamp to hold that bad boy up high.
See the high loop (hill) in the top right corner?
2. Clean the filter for any smelly dishwasher…musty scents included
My dishwasher filter starts to smell like rotten eggs and trash every couple of months, and develops an orange film if I ignore it. Make sure you pull that filter out and scrub it well with Dawn, a bristle brush, and hot water. This is stubborn, greasy, gunk, and will need the hottest water you can stand. Pouring boiled water over the filter and scrubbing with an old tooth brush after it’s cool works for me. Platinum Dawn is a winner here.
Pay special attention to that area directly under the dishwasher door…I can’t believe the gunk I found gathered there! While these weren’t the direct reason for the dishwasher, they were contributing factors to a general unpleasant musty smell every time I opened the dishwasher door. If your dishwasher smells like eggs and trash, this should fix it.
3. Is your thermostat working?
Put some shortening on a spoon and see if it gets cleaned off when you run a cycle in the dishwasher. Or open your dishwasher mid-cycle and take the temperature of the water. If it’s way less than 120 degrees, your thermostat may not work. I needed a new one, although it didn’t immediately fix my stink problem. It did fix the problem of greasy items remaining greasy. I think it may have also led to the buildup of grease in our drainpipe too. You’ll read about the significance of that soon. See the video on how my husband fixed the thermostat in our new-to-us Kenmore Elite dishwasher here. Yes, that’s another dishwasher problem for another article.
I think the broken thermostat could’ve been a contributing factor to the stinky egg smell because it wasn’t adequately melting greasy residue while running a cycle, and that gunk had built up in both the filter and drain hose. The issue wasn’t fixed, but we were getting warmer. Get it?
4. This solved our smelly dishwasher rotten egg problem: a clean drain pipe!
In a fit of last-resort desperation, Caleb took the dishwasher drain tube out, gave it a whiff, and gagged. Of course, I had to smell it too. Nasty! Then he chased me around the house to try to make me smell it again. And they say chivalry is dead.
It was definitely a drain pipe issue: it smelled like rotten eggs and sewage! Look at the dark gunk in the picture. All the ridges in the plastic seemed to hold their own disgusting, putrid, pockets of stench.
Once we realized the stench was coming from the drain tube, it was just an issue of getting that stinking tube clean. Again, we tried several cleaning agents. We soaked the tube in boiling water with Dawn, a vinegar soak, vinegar + baking soda concoction, and even a bleach water soak. Again, nothing cleaned it.
Pinterest couldn’t help. Google couldn’t help. The parents couldn’t help. The know-it-all folks on the handyman websites couldn’t even help. Like discovering the problem, fixing the issue took a whole lot of trial and error for us.
A surprising fix for our stinky dishwasher
We finally reached for the last item in the back of the cleaning cabinet…drum roll, please…Roto-Rooter.
Caleb soaked the dishwasher drain tube in Roto-Rooter for about 30 minutes with the bathroom door locked and the window open. After a nice rinse with hot water, that bad boy was ready to go. Disclaimer: I don’t want to recommend folks run off and soak their pipes with drain clog remover. That stuff is powerful and potentially dangerous, especially if you have kiddos running around. I’m only sharing what worked for us to get rid of this disgusting orange gunk/grease that smelled like poop. If you do choose to use this, be careful about storage and locking doors.
Look at this “before” and “after” picture–this hose used to be white!
When I ran the very next load the smell was noticeably absent! Yay!
For a quick test to see if your drain hose is likely the bad guy, take a look and see if it’s orange. Ours was orange and we could easily see this by just looking, but if you shine a flashlight behind it you’ll really be able to tell if it’s gunked up. Can you see light through it? No? Clean it!
For many folks who don’t have Roto-Rooter in the back of their cleaning closet, it may behoove you to simply buy a new drain hose. Heck, it may be worth it to you to buy a new hose anyway, as Roto is pricey. FYI, dishwasher drain hoses run for fairly cheap on Amazon, $7-$20 depending on your model. But it can be confusing trying to figure out which one will fit your dishwasher.
We thought we found the perfect drain hose cleaning device (an aquarium pipe cleaner) to prevent this from happening again, but it’s not as efficient at cleaning those ridges as we’d hoped, and it’s cumbersome to get it up in there. It’s great at general scrubbing of sink drains through the small holes for stinky sink smells.
Our smelly dishwasher problems are solved?!
Not so fast, folks.
About a month after we cleaned it, guess what came back again? You got it–egg-mania. Nooo! And after more research than I ever thought I’d do on fart smells from a dishwasher, plus trial-and-error drain hose positioning, we found that we were missing an important part of the equation. And we are now drained hose-ologists.
5. Beware of drain hose dip if your dishwasher smells like rotten eggs
After our high loop, our drain hose was dipping down before going back up to drain into the garbage disposal area. So, water and grime were collecting in that lower ditch area and hanging out until the next time the dishwasher ran–which is never more than two days, but long enough to make a stink. When the dishwasher ran and began pushing that old water/grime through the drain hose and through the disposal area, guess what came out into the sink area? That farty-smelling sulphury leftover water from the last time it ran.
Make sure that the drain hose isn’t dipping down before draining. In other words, let it look like a slide going down from the high area into the garbage disposal, not like a widened “U”. Ours looked like a “U” and water + bacteria was lollygagging around in there, developing stinky orange residue between washes. We fixed it with a highly professional zip tie.
We also found this stuff that I think helps the drain hose retain its cleanliness:
Biofresh is an enzyme drain cleaner/odor eliminator that you can pour right into your dishwasher. Pour it in the soap compartment, run a “China” or “Delicate” cycle, and then don’t use the dishwasher for 8 hours. Avoid breathing any mist from the dishwasher during this time. Maybe run it while the kids are at school (I don’t like to run the dishwasher overnight since our smoking Kenmore fiasco) or just keep them outta the kitchen. After the 8-hour wait, you’re free to run a normal cycle. It doesn’t get rid of severe orange/brown gunk if you start with a stinky drain hose. But if you start with a clean drain hose, it seems to help it stay clean if your dishwasher is otherwise prone to stinking.
Dishwasher smells like rotten eggs? Let’s review key tips:
Wow, what a stinky journey this has been. I laughed, I cried, I gagged. After weeks/months/YEARS of trial and error, and a kitchen that smells like rotten eggs, I think we’ve finally found several methods that, when combined, put an end to the drain hose sewage smell.
- Run BioFresh in your dishwasher if your stink is minor, or remove the under-sink end of the dishwasher hose and let it soak in a strong solution like Roto-Rooter or Green Gobbler and/or scrub it with a long pipe-cleaner if the residue is minor.
- Make sure you have that high loop at least 32” above the floor, and make sure the drain hose stays higher than the garbage disposal opening or wherever it’s heading into to drain.
- I avoid the Finish tabs with the red dots. They seem to invite greasy orange residue, both in the drain hose and on dishes! Cascade with Dawn works the best. I don’t like the Platinum variety because it leaves white powder on glass tops.
- I like to use a high-temp wash whenever washing something greasy like a bacon pan or sausage pan (after, of course, pouring the excess liquid grease in a cup, letting it solidify in the fridge, and reusing it when cooking or emptying it in the next trash load). Never pour bacon grease down the sink!
- Make sure your dishwasher thermostat is working, so you know your water is getting hot enough to melt any grease. You want to discourage that orange gunk formation in your drain pipe.
- For good measure, I use Biofresh odor eliminator once every couple of months. This works nicely in the shower drain too, if you tend to get a stinky shower drain.
I’m thrilled to pieces that my dishwasher no longer smells bad, and my boys will stop accusing me of crop dusting the kitchen–or will they? Caleb is excited that he doesn’t have to keep pulling the dishwasher out to tinker with it. And of course, we’re both tickled that it was a fairly inexpensive fix.
In fact, here’s actual footage of me celebrating with Caleb and the boys:
Actually, the boys might be a little bummed out that they’ve lost a long-running fart joke. There’ll be others.
