A corner of our office smells like acidic diarrhea. Presuming that no-one in my small office has actually pooped in the corner, what else could smell like that? I’ve tried sniff-testing the area and I can’t pin down the source to any place. There’s a lot of filing cabinets, boxes, and messy storage (mostly paper supplies and old books) over there, and I don’t want to go moving everything individually if I don’t have to.
I also really want to get that scent gone - it’s been there for two days now and it’s making me sick to my stomach when I have to go in that corner for supplies.
I’m familiar with dead mouse, animal pee, with a few random chemicals, and various molds and mildew - this isn’t any of those.
What should I be looking for? How do I get rid of the smell? Help!
We just had a problem with a horrible odor in our office, but we knew it was coming from the bathroom. The rubber gaskets were messed up and allowing sewer smell to permeate everything. It was gross. Hope you find your source soon.
Since the smell is near the bathroom, I wonder if the toilet’s drain pipe is leaking raw sewage (or sewer gas) underneath the floor?
If a trap is dry, the gas would be coming out from the plumbing item (sink, toilet, tub/shower drain) served by that trap. IOW, if the dry trap is in the bathroom, the gas would be leaked into the bathroom; one would expect the smell to be strongest in the room where the leak is located.
And if the problem is a dry trap, the solution is easy: run some water through all of the plumbing items you find so as to ensure that all traps are filled.
If this was posted last week, I would swear you were one of my employees as we just had this very issue. The smell weren’t concentrated IN the bathrooms but up and down the bathroom hallway. It ended up being a trap in the bathroom floor nonetheless. They covered the trap and we haven’t had the odor since. Do you have those traps on your bathroom floors?
I don’t know - I’ve been in and running the water, so I don’t think it’s them running dry. I am a little concerned that it might be sewer gas leaking out.
If that’s the case, I’ll have to bite the bullet and call maintenance down from HQ. Urgh, that’ll take ages. I was hoping it would be some small dead thing I could get rid of myself.
I worked in an office that had plants scattered about, and one of them started to rot or something. It looked okay from the top but it started to emit a horrible stench not unlike what you describe from its pot.
We once had a “mystery stench” in our office, and we hunted and hunted for the source with no success. Finally, we went into a nearby associate’s office and looked in the file drawers. There were several coffee mugs half full of old partially-eaten oatmeal, and they were all green and fuzzy. In addition, there were a few pairs of dirty pantyhose. I do not want to speculate why they were in there.
At any rate, we cleared away the debris and management informed the associate to knock it off.
Sewer gas doesn’t really smell like shit, it smells like, well, sewer gas. I think. I mean, any time I dismantle any drain, be it a bathroom sink, kitchen sink, toilet etc, they all smell exactly the same and it’s pretty unmistakable. My thought process is normally “What the hell is that smell?..wait, I know, it’s…oh, that drain pipe is open, I should probably cover it.” It’s definitely not ‘poo’ smelling, but it’s pretty distinctive.
Also, ISTM a dry trap would cause a problem in the bathroom. If the smell was in adjacent rooms, wouldn’t that indicate either a bad wax seal or broken drain/vent pipe? Something that would allow sewer gas (or sewerage) into the wall/floor/ceiling cavities?
Do you have a drop ceiling? You might want to stick your head up there just for kicks. If the smell is coming from above it might be hard to locate from below. Beyond that I’m not sure what to tell you. Check for dampness. Turn off any air handlers to keep the smell in one spot when you’re looking. Try to keep the noise level as low as possible so you’ll be able to hear any rodents (maybe set traps for a night or two). Get rid of any non-dry food that could be spoiling.
Acidic diarrhea smell, coupled with storage of office supplies - you haven’t by any chance got any of those kind of fuzzy display boards over there, have you? The kind you can stick pins in or use Velcro on because they’re covered in/made of felt. They put one up outside my classroom months ago, and it still smells like someone had an accident out of one end or the other the whole way up the corridor. I think it’s more like puke, but my head of department thinks shit. It’s strong and nasty, anyway.
Sometimes the office supplies themselves can smell pretty strange too. Sniff the cardboard boxes.
I once worked in an office that had a strange smell coming from the desks. Working late one night, I discovered that the cleaners were using the same bucket of water and cloth to clean the desks that they used to clean the toilets!
We had a similar problem traced to leaking sewage pipes (or more properly “soil pipes” in plumbing parlance). Where the smell goes can depend strongly on otherwise unnoticed HVAC-induced pressure differences between rooms and wall cavities.
Could be soaking into the ground under the concrete. Or under the carpet pad.