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How to Keep House Smelling Okay?
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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Some commenter said it smells like fart. That smelling ingredient would be butyric acid then. It can be "caught" and neutralized in a generated nebula from water with sodium carbonate.
Needs some tinkering to build this as the air intake for a whole house, but cheaper than the charcoal in the long run.
Another option is a photocatalytic filter from titanium dioxide and ultra violet light. Costly, but only once.
Butyric acid smells like vomit, not farts. Fart-type smells are usually sulphur-containing compounds like hydrogen sulphide.
I note that this page gives sodium sulphide as one of the chemicals used in paper making, which readily turns into hydrogen sulphide in wet, acidic environments, so that would be my best guess.
I suppose that means it's possible that if there's butyric acid vapour coming in from elsewhere(?), then sure, that could be the trigger, but you'd smell vomit first.
Either way, a cheap thing to try would be a homemade baking soda deodoriser. That would neutralise acids as well as hydrogen sulphide (by turning it back into the sodium sulphide).
The main caveat is that if any of the other smelly compounds are alkaline nitrogen compounds (skatole, long chain diamines), baking soda won't help with those.
Another cause, the same cure. Nice :)