Phantom urine smell!! someone give a hand!? okay...so i moved to chicago in november and i be really...
okay...so i moved to chicago in november and i be really excited for summer finally getting here until the "smell" arrived. at first it was awfully minimal and didn't pay attention to it, but concluding thursday it smelled like a mens' bathroom. i'm conversation about the smell of residual urine...somewhere. i initially only just chalked it up to the heat and skipping a week on the bathroom detail (i verbs it every two weeks!). but then when i attempted to track the source down near my nose, i come up empty. i could smell it but when i tried to hone surrounded by on it, it would dissipate...weird. so, this previous weekend i cleaned it...the whole bathroom: shower, shower curtain, toliet, sink, floor.everything, but the scent be still there. so i bought some CRL, the super cleaner, and made the ruling that i was going to win this. did another round of cleaning and contained by doing this discovered that my toliet, as it meets the adjectives bathroom floor, isn't caulked and there be funk built up there.
Answers: There's a couple of possibilities.
The toilet not self caulked may be the clue. That suggests to me that a previous tenant did some repair and didn't really know what they were doing. If that's the crust, you basically call for the building super to remove the toilet and re-install it, carefully seal everything that needs to be hermetic. Where the fixture meets the floor, you enjoy a large "wax ring", and if the handyman that removed the toilet didn't replace that, it may be that it isn't hermetically sealed properly, and there's your source of the smell. That's not the caulking, it's inside the unit. A being that would re-install without caulking is a probable suspect for re-installing without a exotic wax ring.
Another place it came come from is also because of incompetent repairs. Once the marine drains from your sink, it goes through an S curve which keep vapors from coming up the sink, because below there, it drains right into duplicate pipe as the toilet. If that pipe isn't sealed at adjectives points between, you get odor coming up below your sink.
If you're lucky, it's one of those two. If it isn't, there may be leak in the pipes that come from other apartments.
Ask the Manager to enjoy the super come and inspect the sink and re-install the toilet. See if doing those two things fixes it.
My son had this prob. His toilet be leaking around the stamp and also running back into the baseboard so you couldn't see anything. We put a unmarked seal and consequently I poured allot of vinegar into the baseboard. We did this several times and the smell went away.