We bought a new bath mat over the weekend. I knew from experience that new mats often have a nasty chemical smell, so when we got it home I immediately opened it and put it outside on the porch for the night. I figured the smell would dissipate overnight, but no such luck. The thing still fricking reeks.
It’s been in our tub for two day now, and I’m running out of ideas on how to try and get this stench out. A couple times a day I put a few inches of water in the tub and let the mat soak – sometimes with a scented bubble bath – sometimes with bleach – but the smell remains.
Any ideas on how we can get this thing to lose the stench?
You will reduce it by rolling the mat into a tube, wrapping foil or plastic wrap around it (like the paper around a cigarette’s tobacco, open at the ends), and sucking or blowing hot air through it for a while. Your vacuum cleaner exhaust might be good for this, though ideally you want something you can run for a few days.
Forcing the flow will move much more of the vapor out of the mat, Heating the air will cause more of the substances that are vaporizing to diffuse to the surface of whatever little bit they are part of.
You might also find some chemical treatment, but it would depend on what exactly was coming out. For example, I hear that you can accelerate the elimination of formaldehyde fumes in a new mobile home by closing the thing up with bowls of household ammonia left all around, because the ammonia causes the most accessible formaldehyde to turn into something else (I don’t know what, and am not sure about this, and am not a chemist - but you get the idea in general).