Smell Of Smoke

My Top 3

, . We have been in this apartment about six months. Before Melanie arrived, I had the TV, chair and other “living room” items in the large main room. It had an imaginary divider between the dining and living room areas. It quickly became apparent that the living room space was not going to work where it was. This was for two reasons. First was that in the same area was the blower for the HVAC. It was loud and forced you to have to turn up the volume of the TV quite a bit ever time it came on and down when it went off. I feared having the TV too loud for the apartment above us. The second is that . It would drift over from where I assumed it was coming in at the HVAC closet. For these two reasons, I moved the entertainment are into what was to be the office. But we still have a problem with the smoke smell… any advice?

They are as frustrated as us, but we are the ones who have to live with it. It is impossible to know how much smoke is coming over and I have been concerned about its impact on Melanie’s health since she has asthma. Of course, thoughts about her being pregnancy are also on my mind. We have closed the air vent coming into the bedroom to keep the smoke out of that area while we sleep.

What I need from you is advice on how to, once and for all, find out how it is getting into our apartment and get it stopped. I truly believe it coming in HVAC path. The main areas of odor outside the HVAC closet, in the bathrooms and bedroom. The interesting thing is that the few times it was in the 2nd bathroom, that bathroom only has a fan exhaust, not a HVAC vent. Almost like the smoke is being forced from its source to the place where the bathroom fans exhaust and then pressure forces the smoke into our apartment via this route, as well as through the main HVAC unit.

We are desperate. I have been trying to think outside the box and came up with the idea of placing some cloth across each air source or location it may be coming through. After several days of odor, we would take the clothes and spray them with a solution that would react with one or more chemicals in the cigarette smoke, causing a color reaction. My problem after searching on the Internet is that I cannot find reference to a “solution” that would give me the result I am looking for (or any solution at all). In addition, there are reported to be 2000-4000 different chemicals in the smoke and I have no idea in what concentration each is found so I could pick some of the highest ones and finding chemicals that react with them. Finally there is simply too much on the Internet related to smoking to week through.

I then thought of a more simple solution. Do the same thing with the clothes then just take each one down and smell each one. The ones with the smoke odor would be the source. I would need a good odor absorbing cloth to do this well. Problem with this is that the sense of smell gets affected the more you smell something so determining which is stronger may be difficult.

In any event, any advice on either of these ideas or others would be greatly appreciated. The landlord has been notified again this morning and will hopefully be here early in the week to try more to solve the mystery. Any additional ideas I can get to offer them would help.