Monday Motivation: Stop Ignoring That Smell Under Your House

Monday seems like a great time to talk about smells; specifically to talk about motivating ourselves to get rid of them.

Ask any of our system design specialists or foremen how to describe the smell of a wet basement or crawl space and you’ll get a variety of...colorful...answers. “Open grave” is one of my favorites. Others include decaying gym bag or simply the person pretending to vomit. It’s bad.

But I never really understood how truly awful it is until my bathroom was finally overcome by humidity and I met it nose-first. I rent, so you can imagine how well peripherals like the bathroom exhaust fan are kept up, and the bathroom had just developed this SMELL. We keep it pretty clean, so the smell would often be momentarily overpowered by bleach, but it always came roaring back.

I was like a woman possessed. I washed and then eventually replaced all of the towels, the bath mat, even the shower curtain liner, convinced something was harboring mold or mildew. I put a fan in the doorway to act as supplementary exhaust. I washed the walls. I kept the shower curtain open. I kept the shower curtain closed. I kept the doors open. I kept the doors closed.

Nothing worked for more than a few minutes.

Finally, one afternoon, I looked at my husband and said, “We need to buy a dehumidifier. Now.” Turns out he’d been similarly flabbergasted by the smell but we both thought that we were overly sensitive, and both just lived with the smell as we tried small fixes that went nowhere.

Considering I write about the problems of wet basements and crawl spaces literally all day, I’m actually embarrassed that it took me so long to realize that there was a humidity problem. When the moisture problem is in your basement or crawl space, the smell can travel up into your house and make life miserable. But you don’t have to live this way, slowly turning into Doc Brown from Back to the Future as you try and figure out WHAT THAT SMELL IS.

We bought a simple, inexpensive tabletop dehumidifier (since the bathroom is tiny) as a test run, and within hours there was a palpable difference. We let it run 24/7 and there hasn’t been a smell since.

Now, you’ll need more power for your basement or crawl space. But if a rinky dink dehumidifier (it’s smaller than my coffee maker) I bought from Bed Bath and Beyond can make that much of a difference, think about what our SaniDry line can do for your home. SaniDry dehumidifiers are the best of the best, with the new Sedona packing a big punch in a small package to fit comfortably in even the shortest crawl space. The new Sedona removes more than 11 gallons of water a day, is Energy Star certified, and can be ducted. 

As we enter the most humid part of the summer, stop living in a locker room - call us to talk about your dehumidifier options and get your basement or crawl space dried out for good.