"phaeton" wrote in message
oups.com...
Lately I've been noticing a specific smell in the house. It's
something I've smelled before in other houses I've visited or lived in
with gas appliances (heat or otherwise). I'm going to guess that it is
a "burned gas smell". It smells faintly like unburned gas and
something else, like 'heat' i guess, even sometimes a little bit like
kitty litter. I know that's a bit silly, but I can't think of anything
else that smells similar, and on top of that my nose doesn't work so
well anyways. In fact, the Missus says she can't smell what I'm
talkinga bout at all.

My water heater always has an odor to it. Very faint, but there.

Right after I installed it I smelled something other than that. I got my
son (figuring he had a better sense of smell than me) to hunt it, and he
isolated it to the valve.
I called the utility and they sent someone out with a sniffer. He tracked
it down to a loose fitting in the valve. He flagged it and said that if it
wasn't fixed in a week he would have to shut it down. The water heater
people came out and fixed it (I was so relieved it wasn't my installation!)

The utility man said that the small leak I had was pretty harmless, but
obviously had to be fixed. A leak big enough to be dangerous is
overpoweringly horrible smelling; there is no uncertainty about it.

So, my guess is that you don't have a problem. But having the utility check
it is free.

I have two CO detectors. They aren't all that expensive, and the odds of
two malfunctioning...