We bought a house and moved in.
After a while, our cellar was smelly, and I wondered why. The stinking smell had a weird thick, almost sweet quality to it, as you’d expect mold to smell, so I was not ready to just wait. It then dawned upon me that the people that sold us the house had had little fans all over the place. So it became clear they must have known about the smell.
After all, there’s a reason why mold decides to grow inside a house, and our smell was so fat, if ever you relate to “fat smell”, that I reckoned that mold was big enough to hole votes. I had no idea where humidity would be located; maybe there was some sewerage smell, maybe some sink stink. After all the house did not exhibit any visible damage, no cracks in the wall, not a thing to be seen. The washing machine was of a company called Zug, and these machines are known to be extremely sturdy and last a life time, they cost a fortune to buy but they are never, ever, a source of trouble. So the machine could not be the problem by brand reputation and the house could not be the problem by inspection.
At first, the whole room stank. So I cleaned the floor and aired the whole room out. I could then rule out corners, the walls, the floor and the windows as possible source of the smell.
Then I checked all sinks, putting my nose into each and every one of them. Yeah, sure, they were kind of smelly. I ended up cleaning all of the sinks with some enzyme powder in order to evaluate the persistence of the stink. This cleared all sinks of any smell within 1/2 a day.
The washing machine remained. My logic behind identifying this washing machine as source of smell was simple: if nothing else stinks, it *must* be this item. I was looking for a considerably large sized source of smell. Maybe you also think like me: if the stink has a certain impact and if there is a stink whiff that has a certain ‘oomph’ to it, I am automatically trying to estimate the size of the source of the stink. In this instance, I was trying to size the source too, and according to my guesstimate, I was looking for something large.
Our washing machine model was a ‘taken over’ (inherited from previous house owner) top notch Swiss brand washing machine, that looked pretty clean and sturdy.
After a bit of fiddling, I found that the washing machine drum contained a lot of stinking air, and concluded that this was probably the source of the smell.
‘Stinking washing machine’ is an often encountered problem, so we found a technical solution for this: Standing machines sometimes, particularly in hot summer (as in our case) develop ugly smells, that can be cleaned out by running a hot cycle (95 degrees Celsius) with apple vinegar and baking soda.
I got lots of both and after a short while, the machine did not smell too bad any more. For a day or so, I thought I had solved my problem.
Only, the smell came back. Somehow, things did not improve, while the smell was clearer, somehow moldier, crispier than ever. In a weird way, this cellar originally must have contained a whole set of layers of stinks – and it was up to me to take off layer by layer of that smell to get to the source of the biggest stink.
So what’s a man to do? I took all consumer moveable parts off, and figured one particularly smelly area would be the washing powder container at the top of the machine. I summoned a service man from the manufacturer, who sprutzed some decalcifier around and said the machine was now in perfect working order. Indeed, the machine seemed somewhat ‘cleaner’.
Only, the smell came back once more, now at a crispiness unsurpassed.
I then decided to trust my deep bloke instinct, take a screw driver and go for the MOLD FOCUS, and ‘hunt until found’. It took me about an hour to take the whole thing apart, take photos, and then put it back together, and here is what I found:
There was extensive rust under the drum. This was the area that was very smelly. There were noteable areas of calcification – indicating that this had been going on for a while -, and there seemed to be also some areas with mold. Humidity was noticeable underneath the drum, extending close to parts that contained electricity – hence constituting real danger. According to the ‘internet’, humidity underneath the drum indicates drum damage, which was reported to ‘possibly be hard to detect and difficult and costly to fix’.
The ‘repair bill’ of the spray sprutzing service man was generously dropped by the washing machine manufacturer.
I decided to buy a new machine, went to the Stiftung Warentest website, obtained their latest consumer device test reports for washing machines and took it from there.
Update 2004: In the meantime, there were recurrent very mild ‘smells’. All of them originated from siphons that were not flushed. Since we have rather dry air in the house, the siphons tend to dry out. So I started to flush the siphons once per week or twice per month, using ample amounts of hot water with detergent. This effectively prevented these mild ‘smells’ from occuring and, in my view, constitute a normal maintenance for anyone ‘having siphons’ in dry air environments.
Update 2005: I covered the siphon cover with an insulating piece of rubber and jammed it underneath the lid. Since then, absolutely nothing at all that smelled.
More story behind this: The people that owned the house before me were in a real hurry to get out. I also managed to push the price down in that context, quite a bit, a lot really. Funny that a very likely reason someone ran from that house was that terrible smell no one could trace. If I had relied on the repair man, I would still not know where the problem was. So a bit later I met that woman in a supermarket and told her that the whole problem was the washing machine, one device swap later and a bit of rubber on the siphon, and all was sweet really.
