Praise for the P-Trap

Another evening, another huge freaking cockroach that crawls up the drain into my bathroom sink.

It always seems to occur at night, just before I head to sleep, as though they're trying to give me nightmares.

I know why it's happening: some genius decided to install a bottle trap under the wall-mounted sink instead of a p-trap, the design of which allows all the water to drain away, leaving a dry pipe connected to the sewage system.

Of course the cockroaches are going to come in; there's nothing standing in their way: it's like a super highway to food and shelter. A standard p-trap would at least give them pause. Some people claim cockroaches can swim while others say they can't, but that's not the point. Standing water in a p-trap is a basic barrier; I doubt cockroaches are sentient enough to figure out that a quick swim through the bend will bring them to Nirvana. Plenty of room exists under the sink for a p-trap, so it looks to me like the contractor was just lazy.

Now I've decided that every night I will plug the sink, but not before first spraying a good blast of bleach into the pipe. That should make the little buggers scurry off, so that when I unplug the sink in the morning they're not lying in wait to pop out. I also have zero interest in opening the bottom of the bottle trap because I have a feeling a big glop of soggy dead cockroach corpses would fall out, and that's not something anyone needs to see.

Because that probably would give me nightmares.

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