I live in an apartment on the top floor. It's the dream apartment for me except for the heavy cooking smell from neighbors entering the unit. I believe the main culprit is the bathroom fan without manual control, it has a motion detector and runs for hours whenever sees any light or movement. The smell was tolerable the summer since we kept our windows open, fresh airflow.
It's now winter, and we keep the windows closed. When the bathroom fan runs, it creates suction, pulling air into the unit from wherever it can.
I detected two sources of air coming in:
- The breaker box in the entrance (on the shared wall with another unit)
- Range hood duct (poorly sealed, duct shares a common "box" on the rooftop with other units)
The smell does enter through the range hood duct even when the bathroom fan is off.
So far maintenance only interested in hood duct exit, and installed a second flap to prevent air from coming into my unit to that said box, no difference. There were talks about installing a backdraft motor on the rooftop as well, but at this point, I'm pretty sure I'm being ignored and not confident to press on this since "smell" is hard to prove.
Since I'm on a rented property, I want to address these with light, reversible modifications. My ideas are:
- Breaker box:
- Use a thin rubber seal around the inner gap of cover. A snug fit should work, the cover is rarely opened.
- Use clear silicone to fill the gaps around the frame.
- Range hood:
Does this sound like a good plan to you? Are there any fire/safety codes that I'm missing, or some alternative that would work better?
Attached images of the breaker box and range hood duct.
Best Answer
Every residence, excluding the ISS, submarines and similar special cases, needs a certain amount of makeup air. Newer buildings tend to let in far less air as a way to improve energy efficiency, but there is always some air coming in or else you would end up with too much CO2 and not enough O. See Apollo 13 or a report of a mine disaster for details.
That being said, if the problem is excess draft caused by the bathroom fan, stop the bathroom fan! Since this is a rental, you can't replace the motion sensor without permission. But a piece of duct tape over the sensor will fix that problem really quickly. Alternatively, you could tape some sort of flap over the sensor so that you could turn it on/off as needed in order to ventilate moisture from the bathroom after a shower or bath. Much like many people place a removable cover over their laptop camera and remove it when they actually want to Zoom.