LESLIE: Now we welcome David from Oregon and you’ve got a question about a sink. What can we do for you?
DAVID: I’d like to disinfect the trap that’s underneath the sink and I have a black porcelain sink in the powder room that I wanted to put some bleach into to disinfect it but I was afraid that the bleach might bleach out the black porcelain …
TOM: No, not if it’s porcelain. And by the way, I understand what you mean about having to disinfect the trap. I had the unpleasant duty of taking one of those apart this weekend …
LESLIE: Ugh. (laughing)
TOM: … and it wasn’t pretty. The stuff that gets stuck in there – yuck (chuckling) is the only way I can put it. But if it’s a porcelain surface, then it’s not going to be absorbent and it’s not going to have any color that you have to worry about fading out. So I think using bleach in a situation like that is fine. I may not use straight bleach; I might use, you know, maybe a 50-50 solution and letting it sit …
LESLIE: Bleach and water.
TOM: Yeah, bleach and water solution. But I don’t see any risk to the sink in using that material on it. OK, Dave?
DAVID: The other question I had was I had heard that you shouldn’t put bleach down piping that is plastic and the trap is made out of some type of plastic PVC …
TOM: No, not an issue. We have plastic PVC pipes in our home all the time and the bleach is fine. I mean think of all the laundry systems that are out there that are dumping their water down a plastic pipe. Should be OK, David.
Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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