Strange Smells

[Endulini]

Hi,

We've recently moved into a new house and have noticed a strange smell in one of the bedrooms, it was present when the house was empty i.e. before we moved in and remained despite having had the carpets cleaned. We've (temporarily) sealed up the vent to the bricked up fire place to see if it was coming from there, no luck. There's nothing to smell in the loft space above the room either.

My suspicion lies with a brown stain on the ceiling directly under the central heating expansion tank, it's old and not spreading but how feasible is it that this could be the source of the pong. My initial impression is to paint over it with an oil-based paint and then finish with a normal white emulsion; assuming that this is the cause is this strategy likely to work?

Thanks

[Nozza]

It took me two years to track down a bad smell in a house a few years ago. It only ever seemed to occur on sunny bright days when I got back from work.

Eventually the light bulb in the hallway stopped working and I went to change it. After touching the light fitting my hand stank of the bad smell.

I concluded that if the sun was shining into the hallway, then I couldn't tell the light was on, and it got left on long enough to heat the fitting until fumes came off. After changing the fitting the bad smell disappeared, and I checked the light was off before leaving the house.

Just a thought

Noz

[meow2222]

Rust stains dont smell. Have you stripped the room out, ie removed carpet and everything else? What type of floor is it?

NT

[mogga]

You cleaned the carpet? Did you look under it?

[David in Normandy]

Could be a dead rodent under the floor? In which case the smell will fade over a few weeks.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I had a bad smell that I couldn't find.

Not until long after it faded and I lifted my camera bag from a room corner and found the dead mouse under it that the cats had brought in.

[Adrian]

Had something similar in the stained glass studio last summer. Turned out to be a mouse that had somehow got wedged between a couple of plastic central-heating pipes...... ...was somewhat dried out by the time I finally sussed where it was....

Adrian

[David in Normandy]

Shortly after moving into this old French house I found several mummified mice under and between the kitchen cupboards when I ripped them out. Seems a daft idea to me to leave an inch or so inaccessible gap between the floor and the bottom of cupboards. I made replacement cabinets with nowhere for rodents to hide and make nests. Trouble is when you live in the countryside surrounded by grain fields invading mice are inevitable.

[John Rumm]

Any clues as to what sort of smell?

Fishy / urine (hot thermosetting plastics) Mould? Damp? Rotten Eggs? Something else?

[jal]

My thoughts exactly: you don't say smells "like what".

Nothing smells like a dead thing - you can usually tell a corpse when you're near one, though an old dead mouse will smell less than a recently dead badger, I can tell you.

Similarly, if someone did a No.2 under the floorboards, you wouldn't be asking us, because it'd be obvious.

Nozza's response is good: "the light bulb in the hallway stopped working..."

Yes: overheating light fittings can smell like dead fish.

That stain sounds ominous though: try scraping the plaster away and see what _that_ smells like?

j.

[Endulini]

Cheers Guys,

The smell is a sort of sweet foody type of smell, it dissipates quite easily if the door is left open but is a constant if it's shut and seems to concentrate.

I'm reasonably certain it's not a dead animal or turd as it's definitely not that sort of smell and there's no flies..... It's doesn't seem to have got worse with time or got any better.......

[Jon]

Sounds like an air freshener's in there. Have you asked the missus if she's sneaked one in the room?

I know my missus would have one of those glade plug-in's in every free socket available in the house if she could get away with it.

[David in Normandy]

Mine is banned from using them, but she still sneaks similar things into the bathroom. I've been telling her for years that scientists will one day discover they can cause cancer, asthma or various other ills. Recent research indicates that there may indeed be links. I suspect that a few generations down the line will look in horror at some of the chemicals we deliberately expose ourselves to on a continuous basis - like we look back at the Victorian era and radioactive bath salts and lead in cosmetics etc.

[Rod]

And I thought I was the only one who wanted them banned. :-)

(Partner does *not* see the need for them either.)

[jal]

What is this room above? (i.e. what is below it!)

We used to get food smells in our extension bathroom. I eventually twigged that the ceiling in our utility downstairs had small gaps around the edges, where the plasterboard had shrunk a bit; the utility is next to the kitchen, whence cooking smells travelled; they travelled into the floor space via the aforementioned gaps, and thence into the bathroom via poor sealing of the skirtings (and a ruddy great hole in the floor behind the basin).

john

[David in Normandy]

Shortly after moving into this old French house, I could always smell lunch cooking while upstairs. The aroma was very strong. One day I went into the room above the kitchen and discovered the cause... the kitchen extractor fan didn't vent outside as I'd assumed, it vented directly into the room upstairs! That's the French for you. Why go to the trouble of making a vent sized hole through an exterior wall over two feet thick when you can just make a hole in the ceiling and floorboards above and vent there. Duh!

[Endulini]