Are your toilets the first to welcome guests at your door?

 28th November 2019 | By Anna Armstrong | Hygiene

This is quite an unsavoury topic you must admit. However, myself and my team here at Astral are so experienced, we tackle this subject daily with gusto!

We have all experienced walking in to a public house or a restaurant and instead of being met with the smell of mouth-watering cuisine, or the smell of a nice candle, or even the smell of malt and hops…. We are affronted with the smell of urine coming from the toilets.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is VERY common, and one which myself and my team have to bring up with our customers very regularly.  There seems to be a silent acceptance that if you run an establishment and people have one too many tipples, your toilets (particularly the gents!) will smell like urine – but it doesn’t have to be this way.  During this blog I’m going to explain why they smell (and it’s not bad hygiene or unclean toilets!), and what you can do about it!

So why does it smell when it is regularly mopped?  When a person urinates, in that urine there is a protein called uric acid, which is very sticky, so when some of that urine hits the floor due to splashing back from the urinals, bad aim or some other misdemeanour, that uric acid sticks to the floor, finds its way in to the grout between the tiles and emanates the smell.  As this happens over and over again, as you will find in any public toilet, these little molecules collect, the smell builds, it becomes noticeable when you go in to the toilets, and if not tackled appropriately the smell will happily greet you at the door on your arrival.

If  that’s not bad enough, the uric acid also actually collects down your drain pipe, and as this protein is so very very sticky, it sticks to the sides of the inside of your drainage pipe in your urinals and makes the hole that the urine goes down smaller and smaller and as the molecules collect, the smell builds.

I must also remark that this smell is not only contained in the gents, because not all women have great aim either! If you have children at home, this smell can become a problem in the home also!

So what to do about it? You need to combat both areas. The pipe, although quite inaccessible unless you’re a plumber can be sorted the easiest! All you need to do is to swap your channel blocks which you’d pop in to your urinal with something else.  Your channel blocks omit a fragrance, which just masks the smell. You need to swap your channel blocks for these little blue beauties……Bio Blocks.

These bio blocks effectively eat through the uric acid build up, it will take some time, and it will be dependent on how much of a build up you have, but if you stick with it, use the Blu Away, on your tiles and floors, (I’ll come back to this) and keep using the bio blocks, your bathrooms will not be smelly and the smell of urine will not meet you at the door.

So now that you have got your urinals tackled, let me talk about the Blu Away which will combat all the little molecules which has stuck to your floor, your silicone, your grout from toilet overspill and splash back.  So the Blu Away basically works in the same way as the Bio Blocks, it effectively introduces enzymes into the area, which eat and digest the odour. This works possibly a bit quicker, as it has been cleaned and mopped more often than the inside of the drains.

So if you keep using these two chemicals, that alone along with good housekeeping will stop your guests being greeted by a horrid urine smell.

Next week, we’ll talk about something equally horrible – body fat! Thank’s for reading!

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This blog was written by Anna Armstrong, Director of Sales and Operations at Astral. Please get in touch if there are any particular topics you would like us to talk about on the blog!