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.
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.
there’s probably dog piss in some of the walls too
It’s not a pee smell, it’s a musty dander smell.
My hunch is that it’s in the vents, but I got a quote to clean my vents and they wanted like sixteen hundred dollars, so i’m going to be dealing with it for a while.
If the house smelled like piss, I never would have bought it.
I’m certain you have, but it’s worth asking- have you replaced the hvac filters with hepa models? You can also build a cheap air purifier with a box fan and a hepa filter just to run while you’re away and catch anything airborne