P-TRAPS

Heard of P-traps before? Well it is not a device to catch some nasty wild animal nor is it a SWAT team strategy to catch some hardcore criminals.I had not heard of it until a few weeks back, when my daughter thought of doing a science project on this.
It is the U-shaped pipe located underneath the sink and is considered to be a great invention in the plumbing world as it holds back fumes from floating back from the sewerage tank into the sink and into the bathroom/kitchen. You will not find a kitchen without a P-trap and these P-traps could be carriers for pathogenic bacteria. She also introduced me to the fact that the kitchen is dirtier than the bathroom and the kitchen sinks contains the worst food borne pathogens.

While she collected samples from different households last week,I was left to do the plumbing work (opening and closing P-traps), my God some of them stank. The good news is that all samples we took are doing well and we have healthy growths of bacteria in all petridishes, though this may not be good news for the people living in these households. In the next few weeks we are going to identify these bacteria and I will let you know the results.
During this exercise some interesting survey results came up on dish washing liquids. PALMOLIVE is the most popular dish washing liquid, followed by DAWN, AJAX, and JOY was the poor last.