Originally Posted by
camaro1968
We live in a condo and are on the lower level on a slab. A few years ago, we noticed bubbling in our ceiling above our bathroom that was just on the other side of our laundry room. The neighbor above had replaced her toilet and they installed the wax ring improperly and it leaked and they did not know until we noticed the bubbling in the ceiling. They replaced the drywall just in our ceiling, but I do not think they cleaned the area above with whatever was coming out of her toilet when she used the rest room and flushed it. The dryer vent goes through a cavity just between our ceiling and the cavity where her toilet leaked. We recently cleaned out our dryer vent after 9 years of living here and got a 5 gallon shop vac full of lint. After that we had a horrible smell of urine or something when we ran our dryer about 15 or 20 minutes after it started.
We investigated for months and borrowed a camera with a cable and opened the casing where the bathroom fan was and put the camera up into the ceiling and looked up into the cavity up under the neighbors floor where the dryer vent went through. We seen black stuff and you could see where the floor was saturated and dried up. I don't think it was ever cleaned. Now that the dryer vent has been cleaned the air flow increased and it is not insulated by the lint and air is able to escape into that space heating up the old urine and feces in there with warm moist air and the crystalized urine has come to life again and the smell, is being forced back into our laundry room where there are cracks from where the vent goes through the wall to go into the dryer. It is nasty... I couldn't sleep last night. Now we don't know who to call and who is responsible for fixing the mess, especially since we are just renting... We had a restoration company come out along with our property manager and showed them the tape and the restoration company believes it is black mold and old urine in the space along with other nasty stinky stuff. Now what to do? This is just my investigation and I hope that it is true and the end is near to getting it fixed so that we do not have to smell this horrid smell throgh the winter with the windows closed.
Just wanted to share my story.
Thanks for listening..