Terrible Smell In My Basement! I can’t find the smell. What is it?!?!

For the past couple of weeks in my office, which is in my basement, there has been a TERRIBLE smell, I have just tolerated it but it has been getting worse and worse! I could not – to save my life – find where the heck the smell was coming from! Did one of my dogs have a messy accident somewhere that I could not find? (After lots of searching – no they did not!)  Did a mouse die in the walls or vent of my house and it was rotting where I could not get it stinking up my house? Possibly! I really have no other ideas to what this smell could be coming from!

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Keep in mind, my basement is almost finished, it’s not some dark, scary, nasty basement like some houses have, I keep it very clean and my 400 square foot office is down here, which is where the smell is coming from! This smell is driving me nuts, it smells like someone went in the Wal-Mart bathroom after eating 15 tacos from Taco Bell’s dollar menu and blew up in the toilet a week’s worth of smelly poop! This smell was starting to seriously gag me, and I do a lot of work on my computer so I HAD to find where this smell was coming from ASAP! I could not take it any longer!

I was seriously about to go buy some kind of mask that would block out the smell and then call Ghostbusters to make sure I did not have a ghost standing in my office farting in my face! LOL, but seriously the smell was BAD! I needed to laminate a paper for my dog business building to hang on the wall and the shelf where the laminator is on a low shelf so I went to sit on the floor to laminate this paper that I needed to be waterproofed. WHEW WHEE! The smell, when I sat on the floor, was even STRONGER than the smell I was smelling while sitting in my computer chair! The smell while sitting on the floor was so strong I almost instantly started to gag, I thought I was going to vomit, thank God there is a drain on the floor next to me that goes to the sewer! WAIT A DANG SECOND! The drain! I put my nose close to that drain and BOOM straight sewer smell! THAT IS WHERE THAT HORRIBLE SMELL WAS COMING FROM ALL ALONG, I never thought to check the drain on the concrete floor of my basement.

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So I started doing research on why this would start smelling, and what I could do to get rid of the smell. I am not 100% sure I understand all the fancy words and science behind what was going on, but basically I found on when these drains do not get water in them and some part of them start to dry up, you can smell the sewer from the drains and it will only get worse, not just go away by itself. I read to go get a pitcher of water, and put some drain cleaner or other types of smell good cleaner and dump it into the drain, and that I did! I actually put lots of cleaner and 3 pitchers of water in the drain! The smell was nearly instantly gone and the smell is still gone as of now. I guess all it needed was for water to be back in that part of the pipe that is to always hold a little bit of water to stop sewer smells from coming up through the drain or something like that, still not sure why this helped but it did! I now know for the future where such a bad smell could be coming from and how to easily fix the problem!