I have been having a burning rubber smell coming in the entrance way to my 3rd floor condo. An electrician was out yesterday and checked with no luck finding any electrical issues in my condo and in the landing light outside my condo.
The smell is not in the next door condo - there are only two per floor- and no smell reported in the condo immediately below mine.
The condo's utilize radiator heat on the opposite walls then the smell. Also, the smell is worse at night.
A valid concern, but I have to ask if you are a gal. Gals have acute smell, compared to those beasts from Mars.
Seriously, if you have acute smell it might be some benign artifact that is transient. Keep your nose on it. If it gets worse, get serious about investigating it.
Also, make sure your smoke detector is working, and maybe move it nearer to the smell. There are two designs and it's good to have one of each. One is photo and the other is ionization and says it has a small amount of radioactive something or other in it.
One is better for hot flames and the other is better for smouldering stuff. I don't remember which is which.
I had a neighbor who had a fire in his kitchen stove clock, a real clock with hands that rotate. He said that the smoke detector kept going off so he took it in to be repaired. I don't know where they repair smoke detectors, but regardless, he should have gotten another one before he removed the first. Anyhow, there was a fire, but it took days or weeks before it set fire to the kitchen. (It burned out the whole kitchen and did smoke damage elsewhere.)
Call the local fire department and ask them what you might look for yourself. Do you operate any heaters or fans at night? In what room(s) do you detect the odor? Near water heater or vent? Got anything stored next to water heater? Have a smoke detector? Any factories or incinerators in the area that might operate at night?
FWIW ,,, I'd smell a burning more like electrical smell now and then in the house. Scary ... turned out to be what I'll call carbon tracking in the microwave. I don't use the microwave much myself, so I'd get there long after someone else had used it. But by luck, happened to me one day.
BTW there was a little study on tv 2 or 3 months ago that showed human noses are better than many think. They pulled something with chocolate in it along the grass and had people try to follow the path. They had to get down on the ground and get their noses within an inch or less of the ground, but that helped a lot. They also got much better with a little practice. So I would say, Go look for the origin of the smell. It's not the air itself.
Smells are strange. The one time I had a smelly basement, not burning rubber but moisture related, I bought a 50-pound bad of that stuff that dries things, and put it in a bucket (with a perforated divider in the middle between the empty half and the other half.) After I dried the floor area, I foudn the steps still smelled, even with my nose 5 feet up. I put it on the second step, and after a day or two, it didn't smell there, even though my nose was five feet up. I put it on the 4th step, and that space smelled right after a couple days. But the 3rd step didn't. I still this can't have been accurate, but over time I put it on all the steps and the smell was gone. I would think any smell might have been made weaker, but it would disperse and be the same strength almost everywhere.
Oh, wrong story. Last month I plugged in an old phone machine that hadn't been used for years. Almost immediately I smelled something burning, although not rubber. I turned it off quickly and took it apart, and turned it on and saw wisps of smoke. I couldn't see where the smell was coming from, so before it stopped, I touched all the parts. One was burning hot, although after a half hour the pain wa gone and I didn't need any first aid. So now I know the what is burning, but without a schematic, I can't even guess at what the bad part is. It's probably not the part that is hot.
Actually I bought one with a little built in aiming laser for about $30 a couple years ago... useful for checking automotive cooling systems (and calibrating uncalibrated dash gauges etc.) that might be a useful thing to wave around if nothing else for peace of mind.
If worst at night than during the day..........think to yourself...whats different from night and day. Most likely you run the heat more than during the day...........if so.....you will want to check the baseboard heating. If baseboard heating......most front covers lift up and off. You probably have something, most likely plastic, that is in between the heating coils and melting as you run the heat. If you dont know how to do this..........get someone in to do this asap. If you are going to do this.......first, turn the heat off......turn thermostat all the way down.
But notifying and asking your local fire dept is a very good suggestion. Better to be safe than sorry.
I was sat in my basement the other night and there was an electrical burning smell. One of those swirly fluorescent light bulbs started to flicker. Over a 10 minute period the flickering got worse until the thing died. The screw in part (not the glass) was very hot and I could not touch it. I thought they were supposed to last 15 years !!!
well turn the main breaker off to see if the smell disappears. when i was perhaps 12 years old we had a odd burning smell....... traced to a overheating door bell transformer. which i replaced.
about that time the door bell started ringing at all sorts of wierd times.
i happened to be in the basement. when our new hot water tank turned on the door bell rang.
now i am 58, in january 59.
perhaps these two events were related but after all these years i really dont know. we moved shortly after these problems occured.
Some years ago, I was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet when one of those CFL bulbs began emitting sparks inside the glass fixture. It died leaving a thick cloud of smelly smoke. About that same moment I shut off the switch. I replaced it with an incandescent bulb.
If it had not been inside a glass fixture dome, and had I not been there, it could have started a fire.
I never liked those CFL bulbs, and none of them last anywhere near the amount of time they say on the package. That's just advertising lies.
I did have one of the original ones, which were a simple arch that stuck out about 5 inches. That one lasted 8 or 9 years, and was on almost all the time. It did not burn out. I was broken when a furnace guy came to fix our furnace and was carrying a long duct pipe, and hit the bulb because it stuck out of the fixture so far.
I'm grateful the LED bulbs are now available and getting affordable. I dont like paying for electric to power incandescents, but I always hated those CFL bulbs for many reasons, including they are dangerous, they dont work in cold weather, if they break, you got mercury contamination, and so many more reasons.
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