It’s early in the morning, and you are just waking up to a new day. You turn on the faucet to get a drink of water, and WHEW! Instead of smelling the clean, crisp morning air, your water smells like you are at the fish market.
Why Does My Water Smell Fishy? A fishy smell in water is caused by the decay of naturally occurring organic matter in the water or plumbing, or the presence of high levels of chloramines, barium, or cadmium in the water.
A fishy smell in your water does not mean that there are fish living in your water supply. But that fishy smell is likely caused by the same thing that makes a fish smell, let’s find out.
There may be some organic matter in your water supply
This may sound a little gross, but you shouldn’t lose any sleep over it until you find out more information about your water.
Well, water can come from many different water sources before it gets to your well. In your waters travels, it may have picked up some organic material that has started to decay, and is now giving you water a fishy type smell.
Organic material could mean many things. Leaves, tree branches, grass, and even flowers are an organic material, and as they decay, they can emit an odor.
Depending on which organic materials, or what combination of organic materials is in your water, your water may smell like fish or other decaying type smell.
Other organic materials such as bugs, animals, and of course fish, can emit a rotting, or a fishy type smell.
Since wildlife is almost everywhere that water may be, the likelihood that organic material has been exposed to your well water is actually quite likely.
Ideally, using an ultraviolet purifier will sterilize your well water as it passes through it, leaving your water healthy to drink, and it will most likely eliminate any odors in your water that are caused by organic material.
There are several sizes and types of ultraviolet purifiers available, you can check out some that I recommend here.
If your water only has a faint fishy smell, installing a whole house carbon filter will greatly reduce odor-causing material in your water along with impurities that can give water an odd taste.
It may not be your water at all!
Ask yourself, do you usually smell a fishy smell when you first turn on your water?
And do you smell it more when the water has not been running for quite a while?
If this is the case, the cause of the fishy smell may not be in your water, it may be coming from your drain!
If this sounds like a possibility, go to your sink first thing in the morning, when no water has been used for several hours and follow these simple steps.
First, smell the inside of your sink, put your head right into the sink basin and take a good sniff. Is there even a trace of fishy smell? If there is, we may be on the right track.
Next, with your nose just above the sink drain, turn on the cold water and see if the fishy smell gets stronger very quickly, and then fades some.
Keep sniffing for at least 1o seconds, if the fishy smell continues to fade, or goes away entirely, it is most likely coming from the drain.
Let the cold water run for a minute or so to be sure, and then shut the water off, and see if the smell gradually comes back. If it does, the smell is coming up from the drain rather than out from the water.
Clean out your sinks drain with a little household bleach
If you can, remove the plunger from your sink and clean off any debris that you find on it. Put it aside, and then pour about a quarter cup of scent-free household bleach down the drain.
Let the bleach sit in the drain for two to three hours, and then turn on the water and rinse the bleach out thoroughly.
Let the water run for a good five minutes, then check for the smell again. If the sink is odor-free, congratulations, fishy smell problem solved.
If not, don’t worry, sometimes you will have to repeat cleaning the drain a few times before the fishy smell will be gone completely.
If you don’t notice the fishy smell at first, but notice it when you turned on the cold water, there may be organic material in the water entering your home.
Now, let’s shut the cold water off and immediately turn on the hot water. It shouldn’t take long to notice if the hot water has a fishy smell like the cold water because the odor will most likely be stronger just because the water is hot.
If you have determined that the fishy smell is coming from both, the cold water, and the hot water, this means that not only is the new cold water coming into the home smells fishy as well as older water that has come from your hot water heater.
Installing an ultraviolet purifier and sanitizing the plumbing in the home would be the recommended solution to treat all of the water in the home.
But before installing an ultraviolet purifier, you may want to shock your well!
Shocking a private well is simply putting a chemical into the well to sanitize the water and the plumbing coming from the well.
A simple and inexpensive way to try this on your own is to pour two gallons of household bleach into your well and run the bleach through the house.
Don’t overdo it! Most wells will be sanitized just fine with two gallons of bleach if you want to make it three, go right ahead, but that would be more than enough.
Add the bleach to the well and let it sit for about three hours, then flush all toilets and turn on the cold water at each sink and shower until you can smell the bleach, then shut off the water and let it sit in the plumbing of your home for six to eight hours.
After the bleach has sanitized the plumbing of your home, flush all toilets a few times, and run all sinks, showers and any other water fixture until you no longer smell any bleach. At this point, the fishy smell in your water should be gone.
What if you only have a fishy smell in the hot water?
If you have noticed that only the hot water has the fishy smell in it, it may mean that you have a deteriorating anode rod in your hot water heater tank.
When an anode rod deteriorates, it can often cause the hot water to smell like rotten eggs, but in some cases, it can cause the water to have a fishy type smell.
Changing an anode is not very difficult, but it does entail, shutting off your water, depressurizing your hot water heater tank and then replacing the anode rod.
You can easily get a new anode rod that will come with instructions and even a socket to replace it with.
“But I don’t even have a well, why does my water smell fishy?”
Having municipal water simply means that your water is being supplied to you from a central water supply that has treated your water, making it safe for you to consume.
This doesn’t mean that your water is free of hard minerals, odd tastes, or odd odors.
Often, municipal water suppliers will treat water with chlorine to disinfect it.
But sometimes, your water might have been treated with a combination of chlorine and ammonia. When these two chemicals are combined, they create a compound called chloramine.
Chloramine will do a fine job in sanitizing water, but can often leave the water with a fishy smell.
This fishy smell can often be stronger during the summer months when algae blooms are more plentiful due to the warmer water and abundance of sunlight.
When municipal water has a fishy smell, report it to your water supplier so they can make adjustments in their water treatment to solve the problem.
A fishy smell in your water does not necessarily mean that it is unhealthy to drink or bathe in. It is often just an unpleasant inconvenience that in some cases, you can remedy yourself.