Ding Dong the smell is gone

For the last six years ( ever since we moved into this house ) every winter when it gets really cold outside the upstairs heating unit spreads a really really nasty sewerage smell around. It sometimes gets so bad that we have to open windows to get some fresh air in. I have thought about it each year the smell arrived and tried to find out where it was coming from. It obviously comes from our sewerage system but I could not for the life of me figure out how it was getting into the air cond system. We even had the air cond duct work cleaned out because we initially thought that something had somehow crawled into it and died. There are two intake ducts on the top floor and one of those is close to the laundry room ( yes, it's upstairs.... an American weirdness ) and I have tried a couple of time to try and seal the drainage pipe in there. But I could never smell anything bad in the laundry and the drain has a good u bend in the pipe so I could not see how that was the culprit.

I FINALLY figured it out the other day. And now that I know, I feel stupid that I did not figure it out sooner. The air cond unit is pretty much a sealed system.... the air is sucked in from two intake ducts, goes through the blower unit that either heats or cools the air, and then it gets pumped out through the outlet vents. I took a walk up into the attic and saw the culprit! When the unit is cooling the air it generates condensation and this needs to drain away. Some idiot had plumbed the drainage pipe directly into a sewerage breather pipe and had not bothered to put a proper u bend into the pipe. So, when the unit heated the air, the small amount of water in the pipe would evaporate and I am guessing that when it gets really cold the gasses come up the breather pipe, back up the drain line and into the blower unit and then through our house.

I cut and sealed the pipe as an experiment..... I'll have to re route the drain over to the eve of the house and let it drip outside. And it works! We have a warm house and NO SMELL.

I'm blogging about this because it is a major life event.... you have no idea how bad the smell could get..... you could get nauseous from it.

Oh, Adam is one month old today!!! He is fussy but not as fussy as Matthew was. But it's way more difficult to get sleep when you have a second! And we are both suffering from lack of sleep at the moment.