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Does anyone else in your condo unit have it?
Is it just in One Room? (like Ours)
Are you living near a body of water?
Are you on the first floor?

I have still not figured out our ghost odor.
Just looking for similarities that may help us out.

Has anyone heard of underground crevices that might give off such odors according to the movement of the tide in the SF bay?
(ok, this is just one of the suggestions I have heard but find so hard to believe)

Our Stink releases about every 2-7 days now. Usually in the evening (of course that is when I am home to smell it)
every time we create a movement of air at about 8:30 pm in the room it will go off if it has been about 5 days or so. Even the ceiling fan can get it to release.
What could be under this house? Of Course, the landlords have still not smelled it...so they don't want to deal with it.

Let me know what you think.
Stinkhouse

Just a thought, could the smell be mold? Do you smell it when the floor gets damp? Mold will give off a real bad smell, sometimes it will stay do dormant until moisture or dampness its it. If the bathroom is under the crawl space that could cause a smell if the wood indeed has mold in it.

I would also ask the landlord if before you rented did any tenants before you have pets such as a dog or a cat. I would try cleaning the whole bathroom with white vinegar top to bottom a few times, this will help to get rid of the smell had an animal been there.

Kat

Thank-You Kat for your ideas.
this is not a pet odor. Previous tenants did not have pets and supposedly never smelled this (altho none stayed longer than 6 months)

It is intermittent....It releases every 3-5 days. It's like a big cloud of dead fish smell that emits into our master bedroom.

We have cleaned extensively. over and over again.
The floor does not get damp. It does not smell like must or mold. we did have a mold inspection.....nothing turned up.

Plumbers out there: If there was a leak in the P-trap under the shower....could that take 2 days to dry out and get back flow from the drain????

Still trying to find the source of the Stink.

The same thing is happening to us. Just started happening last week. Smell only occurs in the evening in the master bathroom. Fishy/ammonia-type smell. We live in Texas in a warm climate but the weather has been cool lately. Husband has checked the attic and found nothing there. Haven't checked the vents yet.

We did see a racoon in our garage 2 nights ago. Wondering if it's somehow crawling in the attic. We live in a 2-story house though. Attic is pretty high and roof is steep. Smell can only be detected in the master bathroom. If the animal was living somewhere outside under the house somehow (we don't have basements here), could the smell be that strong to come through the walls from outside. Our bathroom is really the only room that's right on the grassy part of the backyard.

Please let me know if you figure out what your smell is.

Thanks for your Reply.
I will certainly let you know if I ever figure this out.
Hope you will do the same!

I can definetely relate to your plight! We noticed a very foul smell in our front room a little over 8 months ago. Same type of smell, intermittent, no apparent cause. For us, though, it seemed to only appear after we had been moving around in the room. Because of that, we thought it was the carpet (pet odor trapped in it, etc), so we replaced the carpet. After doing that, the smell seemed to go away (this was about 7 months ago), but now it has come back! Same situation, we move around in the room and the smell comes back...we don't have a crawl space (we're on a concrete slab), there are no pipes running adjacent to the room, and we just had our a/c vents cleaned recently. I really wish we could figure this out
!

OMG!!!

This is exactly what we are going through ~ for two years now!! Has anyone figured it out?

We've ripped out new carpet ~ bleached the floor ~ filled the ptraps all daily in the bath near by. I'm almost in tears when I smell "the smell". Our house is 5 years old and we are the only ones to have lived here.

I've tried draino & bleach down drains ~ it hasn't helped!!

Interested in finding out if anyone else has found a solution.

Sue

I think we have found it! We have had water seepage to our floor for the last five years. Not enough for the carpet to get wet on top. It was coming in the hole the alarm company drilled for the window sensors. With a strong westerly wind/rain ~ it's gotten in those holes, seeped into the walls and down to the floor. The floor was damp and the pad and the carpet were ruined. You could see where it had gotten wet, dried and wet again. I think the strong sun through those windows aggrivated the bacteria that was living in the carpet and caused the smell to erupt.

We've ripped out the carpet and are now waiting to see if the smell comes back at all before we recarpet. We haven't looked into the wall yet. We are going to do that tonight.

Sue

Hello Sue,

Thanks for posting your finding! I'm sure your nose thanks you!

Now we need to hear some other success stories from the other posters to this long-running topic! Any progress, stinkhouse?

I found Kat1128's December comments to be "moist" interesting (in retrospect), given Sue's discovery.

Regards,

-k2 in CO

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