I live in one of the northern suburbs of Houston. Within the past two weeks I have begun to notice a strong sulfurous odor whenever I use the hot water at my apartment. I’ve contacted the apartment manager, who had no idea what it might be, said no one else in the complex had mentioned such a problem recently and muttered something about it maybe being related to the city water supply.
Aside from the unpleasantness of the odor, I’m not all that concerned, unless it turns out to be something like a toxic by-product of bacterial action. Anyone got any ideas what it may be?
Is this at every faucet in your apartment, or just a specific one?
I was having something similar happening in our upstairs bathroom sink, and it befuddled me. Everytime I turned on the faucet, I smelled a funky ick smell. I finally figured out it was air coming out of the overflow drain, not the water itself. I guess there’s no trap for that drain like there are for the other drains. That’s probably not it for you, but it’s worth looking into.
My parents have a similar problem. They have three hot water heaters in their house. The hot water from one of them smells sulferous. It’s not gas coming up the drains, because I put some hot water in a glass and sniffed it away from the drain. It still smelled icky. I guess that they have some sort of bacteria living in their hot water heater that is metabolizing some sort of sulfer compound into sulfide or some stinky thiol. I’m not sure what to do about it.
We had this problem with our water heater out at our cottage on a lake. We finally worked out that the maintenance guy had put the wrong anode in the tank, and it was reacting to the heavily mineralised water, producing the sulfur smell. As well, the water started turning a gray colour. When we drained the tank, there was a lot of grayish sediment that came out that stank to high heavens. Had to flush the tank several times to get rid of the sediment and the smell.
i’m told that there are different anodes that you can get for the particular mineral balance in your local water supply, but we just cut the anode off the plug and run the heater without one.
The most common cause of the “rotten-egg” odor in tap water is the presence of sulphate-reducing bacteria, most commonly in the water heater. Do you get the odor only from the hot water? This bacteria is harmless, and processes naturally occuring sulphates into hydrogen sulphide, which accounts for the strong smell. A chlorine shock treatment of the water heater should knock it down. Here is the procedure.
I have well water with a high mineral content. If power is lost for a period of time, the gunk plated onto the anode falls off and smells like sulphur.
I’m not sure how applicable this would be to a hot water system in the USA, but in the UK, there is often a header tank (to maintain constant pressure to the hot water system) at the top of a building - it is not entirely unknown for insects/birds/rodents to find their way into the tanks (they are often only covered with loose boards), drown and decompose.
