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Bill Wright[_2_] Bill Wright[_2_] is offline
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Default What smells like gas but probably isn't gas?

QuackDuck wrote:
Hi everyone, I hope you don't mind my first post being a request for
help, but I've been trawling the internet for days and read about every
website/forum post there is about gas smells in buildings.

I live in a 140 year-old(ish) granite building that at some point has
been converted into four flats. Because it was all one big house before,
we do get noise and cooking smells etc travelling between floors.

Natural gas has the smell added to it artificially. It doesn't smell
like coal gas at all. Which type of gas does yours smell like?
The smell added to natural gas is like rotten eggs. Could there be
something rotting away under the floor or behind the fridge or in a
void? I had a problem with a smell like that. Eventually it stopped.
That must have been when all the flesh had gone. I found the cat's
skeleton a few years later.
I dimly remember the tapwater in a college hall of residence smelling
slightly of hydrogen sulphide. Maybe that was sulphur.
If you have sewage pipes behind boxing-in they might be leaking a bit. I
had this problem in the basement. The smell was only there now and then.
I only found out what was happening when the sewer blocked outside and
that caused it to block inside, so the plywood had to come off, and the
outside of the stack was damp.

Bill