RunningBum
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2007
- Messages
- 13,264
Could possibly be that the neighbor quit smoking for awhile, but started back up?
I bought two of these and paid over $130CAD each at Lowe's I believe. They don't do squat even when I put two of them together. Do air filters ever work??
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B004VGIGVY/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Costco has a more heavy duty one for like $400CAD, but I'm hesitating a bit. I could always return it if it doesn't work, so I should probably just do it, but I want to spend big money to try to eliminate the cause.
I didn't know about HVAC filters for smoke etc. I will definitely get one of those! Thank you!
I didn't know about HVAC filters for smoke etc. I will definitely get one of those! Thank you!
. . . Nothing is shared between the units, just the firewall is shared.
They do work. As I mentioned - hotels and cruise lines use them and we had first hand experience. Walked in to the cabin and the stench of smoke was throughout. Cabin attendant told us to go away for an hour or so and he'd take care of it. Came back and the smell was gone and didn't return the entire cruise.
At home, we have a decent Honeywell and use it to remove dust/allergens in the air and it works wonderfully.
The issue is a ventilation pressure problem. Air/liquid always flows from a high pressure area to a low pressure area in order to reach equilibrium. Do you have a closed heating system? Take a few switch plates off walls and check the common wall for egress. Obtain or make a smoke tube using a few matches/candle and a paper towel tube. Extinguish the flame and place the tube over the smoke near the switches/outlets/cracks. Check the ingress or egress of the smoke direction to confirm; with and without the furnace running. Then seal that area, switch plate insulators are available, cracks are sealable. Close or minimize cold air returns in rooms closest to common wall. Open or maximize cold air returns in rooms furthest from the common wall. If your neighbors smoke in the bathroom with a bathroom fan running, that contaminated air goes into the attic. If your bath fan is not running, it is a intake source and a venturi effect from your furnace will pull that contaminated into your living space. Check your kitchen fan as well if it vents to attic, minimize the kitchen cold air return. If your heating system is requiring air, it will pull from the easiest place. So make it work harder to suck smoky air and make it easy to use fresher air.
It will also take a little work from you because it is a ventilation system and there are many moving parts. I had similar problems on a huge scale when dealing with sealed areas/ old works in coal mines. Contaminants from a supposed sealed area was infiltrating active works of the mine, diminishing air quality. It happens all the time.
I doubt it, but I guess anything is possible. There are two of them.Could possibly be that the neighbor quit smoking for awhile, but started back up?
We checked the attic yesterday, and surprisingly zero cig smell. All I could smell was pine and some weird smell...Are you quite sure there are no gaps in the wall in the shared attic area? Builders get sloppy up there. Also, sometimes they (against code) even dump the exhausts from bathroom fans, stove hoods, clothes dryers, etc int this space (whether or not the space is conditioned). Maybe go up there the next time you smell cigarettes and see if the odor is greater up there. If that's the problem area, you can address it in several ways.
You may need a filter that has activated carbon in it. What you are smelling is both fine particulate matter (and this is tha majority of the issue, a that a very fine (e.g. HEPA) filter could catch these) and volatile gasses (which can't be filtered out, even with a HEPA filter. You need carbon to catch this). .
If anything would work, it would be filter like this. It even has an "ionizer" mode, which will increase ozone and do (in part) what a dedicated ozone generator does. It may also cause some lung irritation, I'd minimize the use of that, especially if my house was "tight".This is what I was looking at as the next thing (although I'd rather we find a cheaper solution since we already spent close to $350 on worthless air purifiers (with such great reviews!!!)
https://www.costco.ca/GermGuardian-...fier-with-Bonus-Filter.product.100284624.html
What d'ya think?
I understand OP wants a solution immediately, but I'd suggest finding the source first is the best route, otherwise OP will be throwing money in different directions hoping something works.
Worse would be OP does something, and the smell stops... yahhh, then the smell returns, and maybe its all unrelated to the action OP previously took.
OP - go around with the burning incense and doors closed and see where the smoke drifts near electric plates & switchs, door and window frames, and along the floor, plus check the oven and bathroom fan (with them off).
All this smoke drifting will tell you is if you have air leaks, where smoke could come in.
My guess, from similar situations, is an inside air leak from the adjacent unit, so all means to check it out are worthwhile!
A common building setup is a CMU fire wall, with a wood-framed stud wall on both sides, covered with drywall. The stud wall with drywall decreases noise transmission, may be insulated to further decrease noise, and it gives a house-look, rather than the industrial-look of CMU. But it also hides the firewall, so it makes it more difficult to check (and more likely that penetrations were made).
Any and every penetration of the party wall drywall needs to be looked at: Light switches, outlets, under the sink (pipes) of any kitchen, bathroom that touches the party wall. Those are easy to check. If no luck there, then look at the same items in walls 90 degrees intersecting to the party wall, they could have wiring/plumbing, etc. holes bored through studs that could give an air path from the party wall to them.
If no luck there either, then could be at the sole plate of the party wall. When drywalling, the ceiling goes up first. then the walls, the wall drywall is jammed upward against the ceiling drywall. This will leave a space between the bottom of the drywall and the subfloor. If carpeted, the carpeting is usually over a thinner underlayment, and baseboards are set up a bit so carpet edge can be tucked under the baseboard. Often, the baseboard is shimmed up with small blocks of wood to get the spacing. A leak can occur at the bottom of the wall there, like a joint between soleplates, drywall not fastened to a stud lower down leaving a small gap from the soleplate, a knot or wained soleplate, etc.
If a tile floor, same thing if tile done well, the tile will extend under the baseboard, so any gap as mentioned above can create an air path.
If tile done klutzy (yeah, my opinion), the tile might not extend under baseboard, the baseboard was installed first, tiled later, and the old filler "quarter round" is used at the baseboard to tile juncture.
Thank you for your post.
I'm not sure what a closed heating system is... We have forced air heating with intake an exhaust...
We have only one cold air returns on each floor, so we really can't do much with them. All of them are fairly far from the common wall (7-8ft?) Surprisingly, the attic had zero cig smell that we could detect. We had insulation topped just last year, so maybe it's not obvious? I don't know...
What do you mean by "If your bath fan is not running, it is an intake source and a venturi effect from your furnace will pull that contaminated into your living space."? Are you saying it would be good to run our bath fan (which goes out the chimney, which lowers pressure in the house...?)
It's sounding like this was correct. They probably stopped smoking, at least at home, for awhile, and then started up. Now they've stopped again. Hopefully not just temporarily. I doubt you had a temporary condition with wind currents or anything like that, unless it coincided when the furnace started being used. But you smelled it in Oct and not in Nov and Dec, and I assume the furnace was running there in Ottawa then.Could possibly be that the neighbor quit smoking for awhile, but started back up?
Like I said in my post, we have no plans to sell, and my post isn't about that, but to mitigate the current issue, but thank you for sharing your thoughts.