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.

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
    12·
    14 hours ago

    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.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      9·
      13 hours ago

      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.