posted on July 20, 2006 07:46:42 AM new
ok, here's the deal. we have a rental apt and the last person that lived in there smoked like a chimmney for 1.5 years. never even changed the air filter if you can believe that. so once we finally got this horrendous person OUT of there we were faced with the cigarette smell.
we repainted the walls with kilz & paint, repainted the ceilings, shampooed the carpets, bleached everything else, replaced the central AC itself - and still the odor lingered. enough so that one person rented the unit only to demand a refund the next day.
I looked into renting/buying an Ozone Generator but my husband heard about Coffee. That's right coffee. Good old 8 O'Clock freshly ground. Turns out this friend of a friend bought a building that was formally used as a fish processing building. He said the smell was so bad that they had to wear respirators just to go into the building and nobody would. Somebody told him about the coffee solution and that's what he did. We only bought like 3 gigantic bags of coffee compared to what he bought - but the intructions were to spread it everywhere, turn off the AC, close the door and leave it for 7 days.
We went by and checked it again last night. We did all that 2 weeks ago and cleaned it up, left the AC running for the last week - and now when you walk in, you smell coffee - a little bit, not too bad. I think if we open it up and air it out for a day or two you won't even smell that.
So I thought I'd pass it along.
Anybody ever used an ozone generator? The kind I'm talking about is one that is so powerful you leave it running for 7 days straight and nobody can come or go during that time. Nothing alive can come into contact with it. They use smaller versions for hotel rooms and car dealerships to deal with cigarette smoke.
I only found one other reference to coffee online where they used it in the back of tannery trucks. They said it worked too.
posted on July 20, 2006 08:19:53 AM new
In the moving business, coffee has been used for years. If you are moving cross country, or putting your furniture into storage, a musty or mildewey smell will develop almost immediately inside a refrigerator or freezer, no matter how long you have left them open and unplugged to dry them out. The solution is to take a pair of socks, fill each with fresh ground coffee, and throw one in the freezer compartment and one in the refrigerator compartment. The inside will smell like coffee when it's delivered to your new home. If you don't mind a little mess, you can dispense with the socks and just throw a few handsfull of coffee in loose and clean it up later. Coffee works better than baking soda or charcoal.
If Murphy's law is correct, everything East of the San Andreas Fault will slide into the Atlantic
posted on July 20, 2006 09:16:11 AM new
Interesting! I had an empty Costco bag of coffee beans, the large size bag, which for some reason I brought into my eBay office to dispose of. I wadded it up and put it in the wastebasket. For two weeks the room has smelled (pleasantly) of coffee--not strong smell, just a smell. I can imagine what actual ground coffee could do in a room.
