TL;DR: what are your tricks to keep the interior air of a house pleasant when living in a stinky locale?
For the next couple years, I am stuck on land* in a house that is occasionally downwind from a paper mill. Holy hell, the smell can be eye-wateringly bad when the winds blow just the wrong way. The house is ~1700 square feet with HVAC.
*I normally live on my sailboat and move around at will.
I have an ozone generator for serious de-stinking, but wow ozone is nasty even in small quantities. I have a Corsi-Rosenthal box, but that does nothing for smells. I was thinking maybe a big tray of activated charcoal in the HVAC intake and another in the CR box. In my experience, the tiny charcoal filters in most air cleaners get saturated in about 48 hours. What works for y’all? Super extra bonus points for ongoing maintenance and cost-reduction tips and tricks.
Thank you fellow Lemmings for anything ya got.
Stop him from doing all those drugs and talking to patients that aren’t his. Make him go home, get some sleep, wash his clothes.
Yeah an ozone generator is like fumigation, you should not be around when using it.
You’re probably going to end up getting used to the smell. It’s likely that if you ask your neighbors, this is what they’ll tell you.
Your only other option is an industrial scale carbon filter, those will be expensive. They sell them for ahem grow operations if you’re wondering where to start looking.
I’ll say it again for emphasis you don’t want to be in the same room or building as an ozone generator. It has been linked to lung cancer
Whole family got poisoned by an ozone generator in Japan. They’re everywhere for some reason over there. Horrible things. I check every hotel room now for hidden ozone.
I have a paper mill in my town but I’ve never gotten used to it. That being said, I’m not nearby and only smell it when driving by.
Some commenter said it smells like fart. That smelling ingredient would be butyric acid then. It can be “caught” and neutralized in a generated nebula from water with sodium carbonate.
Needs some tinkering to build this as the air intake for a whole house, but cheaper than the charcoal in the long run.
Another option is a photocatalytic filter from titanium dioxide and ultra violet light. Costly, but only once.
Butyric acid smells like vomit, not farts. Fart-type smells are usually sulphur-containing compounds like hydrogen sulphide.
I note that this page gives sodium sulphide as one of the chemicals used in paper making, which readily turns into hydrogen sulphide in wet, acidic environments, so that would be my best guess.
I suppose that means it’s possible that if there’s butyric acid vapour coming in from elsewhere(?), then sure, that could be the trigger, but you’d smell vomit first.
Either way, a cheap thing to try would be a homemade baking soda deodoriser. That would neutralise acids as well as hydrogen sulphide (by turning it back into the sodium sulphide).
The main caveat is that if any of the other smelly compounds are alkaline nitrogen compounds (skatole, long chain diamines), baking soda won’t help with those.
Another cause, the same cure. Nice :)
It won’t solve the problem, but after a nearby skunk spraying, I found placing one dryer sheet in each of my hvac intakes (with the filter) freshens everything up for a few days.
They make charcoal-infused filters.
I bought a box of four and attached them to the outside of my CR filter. That dramatically lowered the stink in my house that comes from the previous owner having dogs and not taking care of them.
I’ve already pulled the old carpet, scrubbed the entire floor, painted over the worst sections with odor blocking stuff, put in vapor barrier and a new hardwood floor, and run an ozone generator in my entire house while I was at work and there is still just like that faint whiff of dog odor in the house that I can’t quite get rid of.
But the charcoal filters on the CR box fan does the trick.
I drilled 110mm holes in my walls, 3d printed and outside grille, a pipe to cover the wall thickness, and on the inside I added a 120mm computer case fan and picked up a cheap power supply locally. Does wonders for the air quality.
And yes, paper mills smell like the kind of farts you have in between bursts of diarrhea
How does any of that help air quality? All you’ve done is make a hole to the outside.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who is confused
Activated carbon and a lot of it is all that really works for smells that don’t come in pm2.5 size or larger.
I have a Corsi-Rosenthal box, but that does nothing for smells.
It does something by reducing the amount of stuff in the air before it settles, so I would keep using it regularly anytime there are poor air conditions. It certainly won’t solve the problem on its own. The molecules do get trapped in the filters though, so it might need to have those changed if the box itself starts to get an odor when not running.
The smells from stuff that has settled on surfaces or embedded itself in furniture or other porous surfaces will need to be removed and approaches that work well for pet smells should work for industrial smells. Wiping down surfaces, vacuuming and mopping, steam cleaning furniture and carpets, and other things will help improve things. Odor neutralizes like febreeze can help a lot too.