Hi!
I bought a house a while ago, I'm trying to make the basement a decent space to be in but I'm about to give up. The smell increased significantly when I tore down a recreation room with wet fiberglass (pictures available in another thread).
I've drained it (no more moisture damage, everything is dried out)
Torn out all organic material
Washed all walls with bleach
Triple ventilation in the laundry room
Double in the other rooms.
Ozone.
But the smell still comes back... some of the rooms used as tool sheds smell like earth.
What I haven't tried is repainting the walls. Can smell stick in old paint/concrete?
There's wooden flooring above with smell everywhere, but I don't feel anything there.
Is repainting hopeless too?
Help!
I bought a house a while ago, I'm trying to make the basement a decent space to be in but I'm about to give up. The smell increased significantly when I tore down a recreation room with wet fiberglass (pictures available in another thread).
I've drained it (no more moisture damage, everything is dried out)
Torn out all organic material
Washed all walls with bleach
Triple ventilation in the laundry room
Double in the other rooms.
Ozone.
But the smell still comes back... some of the rooms used as tool sheds smell like earth.
What I haven't tried is repainting the walls. Can smell stick in old paint/concrete?
There's wooden flooring above with smell everywhere, but I don't feel anything there.
Is repainting hopeless too?
Help!
Certainly, others might have better tips and experiences, but have you tried a powerful dehumidifier? We had a barely noticeable cellar smell, but after letting a dehumidifier run there for a few days, it almost feels like we have better air in our cellar than on the main floor.
No!namnbyte said:
I've installed an air-to-air heat pump that's always running in the basement, but perhaps it can be compared?
Some, to my knowledge, have a dehumidification function, ours does not. Simply increasing the heat does lower the relative humidity, but it doesn't "remove" the moisture from the air.
Having a "dry mode" might be worth testing though
How old is the basement? I assume there can't be any old drain or vent hidden somewhere if you've torn everything out. What kind of ceiling is it? I helped take down a basement ceiling once in a 1920s villa. It seemed to be some kind of thin slate slabs and inside them, there was some type of wool insulation. Not wood or rock wool but like sheep wool or similar. Anyway, it smelled horrible when we got it down. Strangely enough, it didn't smell particularly bad except like an old basement before we started taking down the ceiling.