A couple of months ago, my wife and I noticed this malicious odor coming from one of the bedrooms in our house. It smelled sort of like wet and moldy insulation. What we couldn't figure out was where it was coming from. It was contained to only the one room, but we couldn't easily isolate it. We started sniffing everything in the room. I'm sure that to an outside observer the sight of us sniffing every object in the room was quite hysterical. After 5 or 10 minutes of identifying different odors, we determined that the smell was coming from the heating vent. Great! To get to the bottom of the mystery smell it was going to require a trip to the nether regions of the crawl space. This sounds like a job for indefinite procrastination!
Luckily, my wife and I had bred a creature of endless curiosity a mere 13 years earlier. The very next day he said, "Hey Dad, you want me to go down in the crawl space to look for that smell?" He asked with excitement. "Why that's a fine idea son, you would probably fit down there a lot better than I would anyway." So off he went down the trap door loaded with flash lights completely oblivious to the fact that he was being taken advantage of.
The smell was not present in the crawl space. The duct work showed no signs of damage or moisture. There was no moisture present either. This didn't make sense. Time to go hi-tech. All nerds have a junk drawer, box, container of some sort that holds a collection of obsolete and no longer used equipment. I remembered some old video equipment somewhere in my stash that might fit down the vent. After some digging around in a box full of tangled cables and a few choice words I found an old USB ball cam. A few more minutes of duct tape engineering and I had a cam on a stick with a flashlight that I could fish down the vent looking for anything foreign. Now what did all that effort and brain power get me? Not a single thing. The ducts were clean. (As far as the 3 foot cord on the ball cam would let me see).
That's it. I was out of fresh ideas. Time to call someone who actually knows what they're doing. Surprisingly, the HVAC guy was able to come over the next day. I was expecting to get stuck on a 3 month waiting list or something. Anyway he comes over and sticks his nose to the vent. "Hmm, yeah, somethin' dead down there." NO! REALLY! He then gave us a few options that all cost about $400 so it really didn't matter which one I picked. Might as well make him earn it. I chose the most labor intensive. The next day he showed up and spent the next 4 hours crawling around under the house vacuuming out all the ducts and disinfecting them. When he was finished, no more smell. Cha-Ching! The checking account was lightened, and off he went. 4 hours later, the smell was back.
Time to get medieval on the duct work. Both my kid and I went down below with weapons of mass deconstruction and amputated the ductwork at both the vent and the furnace plenum and sealed off the holes with leftover insulation old towels and duct tape. The room was now without any kind of ventilation. I opened up the windows, started up a fan and sprayed Fabreeze until I was about to pass out. We left the room to air out overnight. The next morning, I closed the window and let the room acclimate to the rest of the house with the door open. The sickly stench gradually returned.
Out of ideas and disposable income, I consigned myself to the thought that the smell was just something we'll have to live with. The days passed and the smell became less and less noticeable. Sort of like living next to a landfill. Over time, you just stop noticing. A month went by and I figured I would have to eventually replace the ductwork I had done away with. A short trip to the home store and I had more than enough of the right stuff to do the job. With my wife feeding me forgotten tools through the open vent in the bedroom, I manage to reconnect the duct and restore heating.
As I was packing up the tools for the belly crawl back to the access hole, the nut driver I was using rolled under a sheet of plastic. I flipped back the plastic to find the driver and instead found not only the driver but the corpse of a medium sized mouse. I was positioned almost directly below the vent to the smelly bedroom. I just shook my head in disbelief not wanting to waste the energy on generating a cloud anger, frustration and profanity. I used the available tools to excavate a hole about the size of a medium sized mouse and scooted the corpse into it. How the smell chose to emanate from the duct and not foul the air of the crawl space remains a mystery to me. Whatever the physics behind such phenomena, the smell dissipated on that day and has not been noticed since.
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