Thanks a lot for the contribution. I can say that luckily I’m back to normal, woohoo!
It’s been a stressing period, where I started having serious doubts if I can continue living here, but the location is perfect and flat hunting so challenging…
It was not one thing, but a combination of many factors that caused the tipping point to be reached. The number one was the heat! It became much easier to identify things when the temperature dropped.
The thing which awoken the already was this:
But even after the hay was harvested, the situation was still far from good. It was hard to identify anything mostly because of the flowers-grass planted in the nearby roundabout:
it has tiny flowers which give very strong smell
The smell is nice, I admit, certainly it didn’t do any harm to me, but it’s so strong that the winds carry it along the main street up to dorfmatt (train station). Btw, now it’s almost over, it seems the rain destroyed it.
So I mentioned the heat, why? The windows are white inside, but dark outside. What could go wrong? The afternoon sun can heat it up outside enormously. The air starts to be a bit dense inside, within 1 m proximity to the windows, but outside it’s a disaster. The heat must have already worn out the rubbery seal. It got finger sticky, and I’ve read it’s time to replace it. I mounted thermometer on the glass and kept sun away pulling down the blinders the moment sun approaches the windows. The temp still went up to 39 degrees, but the metal wasn’t almost finger burning like the day before, was just warm, so I guess normally the window was heated up ~55 or more.
Next I finally found the smoke. The horrible smell appears at random times, day and night, for a very short burst, but it could linger on the street for 10 min or so. It’s this building
so close, caught it in the morning from the church hill
the smoke lasted about a minute only when I got there, an certainly the smell was around when I went back to make the picture of the building.
Next, I removed a TV furniture as it seemed a bit over polluting with formaldehyde.
Lastly, when the whole building finally cooled down, I indeed found another pollutant in my flat. Over the years I’ve been so swissified that I keep the dumb routine of cleaning the washing machine pump filter after each use. That’s a big issue. The water pump acts as a siphon, if you release the water the drum stays wide open to the sewage pipes. I’ll remember to always pour a cup or two of water inside after cleaning the pump.
In retrospective, it’s clear that all the problems exaggerated when the heat wave came. Normally, I’ve been living with closed windows as the building has the internal air ventilation. I cannot adjust the ventilation efficiency and it wasn’t enough when the problems starting to accumulate. Opening windows was good aid at first (despite the noise) but it was a Pandora’s box.
Sooo now I’m literally back to normal. The ventilation is enough so I have my windows closed and no issues whatsoever.
PS. regarding the aeris air purifier, it’s discontinued. I was considering it because it has been designed with a choice of filters, the gas filter was pricey but was supposed to be one of the best on the market. I’ve bought levoit 200S instead with similar filter choice. It’s a really nice device. One caveat though, from my tests I conclude that it doesn’t have any gas odor sensor, so in auto mode it’ll stay low no matter what’s the gas pollution.
PS 2. I’ve passed through a cloud of the chimney smoke today on my way to shop, but in a moment I realized that I didn’t care about the fact at all.
On the contrary, walking the road early morning 4-5 AM the air is cold and with high humidity but there’s some weird smell. I’ve tried to look around if there’s any factory chimney polluting around, but it’s hard to identify any. Surprisingly there are “smokes” coming out from chimneys even though it’s quite hot right now, so it’s not any mazut furnance.
