Why Does the Restroom Still Smell of Urine?
By Tommy Bachus · Director of Operations Pinellas Park, Fla. — 2 min read
The restroom is cleaned every night and it still announces itself from the corridor. That is almost always a porosity problem, and the products most buildings reach for make it worse.
The smell is in the grout, not on the tile
As urine dries it leaves behind crystalline salts. Those crystals bond to whatever they dried on, and grout is porous enough that they end up inside it rather than on top of it. Wiping the tile does not reach them, and the odour is released again every time the floor gets wet.
This is why a restroom can pass a visual inspection and fail a nose. The surfaces are genuinely clean; the source is a few millimetres below them.
And routine disinfectant can make it worse
Imperial Dade's restroom guidance is unusually direct about this: general cleaners and disinfectants do not remove the source of the malodour, and products commonly used for floor maintenance often make it worse, because wetting the floor releases the odour more strongly than before.
So a building can be cleaning the restroom more often, with a stronger product, and reliably producing a stronger smell each time. The frequency is not the problem.
The floor drain nobody has opened
Floor drains need cleaning on their own schedule and are routinely left out of one. A neglected drain holds organic material and can emit both odour and gas, and because it is a small feature in the corner of the room it tends to survive several changes of cleaning contractor without being touched.
If a restroom smells worst in dry weather or first thing in the morning, an empty or fouled drain trap is worth ruling out before anything else.
What actually removes it
The fix has to reach into the grout and consume what is in there. Sanitizing the surface above it does nothing.
- A bio-enzymatic odour digester, which penetrates the grout and breaks down the bacteria producing the smell at its source.
- Dwell time. These products work biologically and need to be left to work rather than mopped off.
- Grout restoration and then sealing, so the floor stops absorbing what lands on it.
- Drains on a named schedule, in the scope, rather than as an assumed extra.
- Fixture and floor junctions, and the base of every partition, which is where most of the volume ends up.