My sister Kim has been having some issues with a smell in her house every time her furnace system kicks on.
- She called me yesterday and told me that she’s been having this problem for the past week and at first she just thought that she was imagining things.
Now, though, she is pretty sure that every time the heating turns on, a bad smell comes out of the heating vents. She thinks that there might be something inside of her air ducts, which run underneath the floor of her house. I might think that an animal had crawled into the heating ducts, but Kim’s house is built on a concrete slab foundation, so I don’t have any idea how any sort of animal could get into her ventilation system. It’s a closed circuit anyway, so I don’t think that there is any way that it could happen. I told her that it’s probably not a dead animal at all, but that it’s probably an issue with a broken trap on her air conditioning condensate pipe. She has central A/C, and if the trap is broken on the condensate pipe and it goes to the drain, sometimes the pipe can smell and it goes up into your air ducts. Having a problem like that makes a lot more sense to me than a random skunk or groundhog somehow breaking into her ventilation system. She said that she’s going to call both a plumber and a heating and cooling technician today to make some appointments. I hope she can get it figured out!