Recently we started noticing a gas like smell in our living room on occasion, some days extremely strongly.
I investigated almost every cause I could think of which may have contributed to the smell, including calling the emergency gas leak helpline. The gas engineer who attended could not find any gas leak or detect even a small amount of gas in the air.
This left us dumbfounded, and I started pulling up floorboards to see if there was anything under the floor that might cause the smell.
What was odd was that the smell was not present all of the time, only some days. Also it was only strong on some days too, other days just a weaker smell.
After keeping a diary of when the smell occurred, it appeared that the smell was only present on days where we had opened our patio doors or the weather was sunny. This didn’t seem to make any sense!
By some fluke, I started smelling our walls trying to identify the source of the smell and realised that the smell was actually coming from the walls! More specifically the paint that we had used on the walls some 3 months earlier, MacPherson trade magnolia paint.
After turning to the internet to see if this was a common issue I found this thread which suggested a similar problem with Crown paints from some two years ago. Initially this was disappointing as we had used a different paint and there were no reports of other manufacturers being affected.
However on closer inspection I realised that MacPherson paint is a subdivision of Crown paints.
More investigation showed that the issue was featured on a BBC Watchdog program back in 2010 where again Crown denied any responsibility.
I called the MacPherson paint helpline and was immediately offered a resolution in the form of some kind of alkali sealant and replacement magnolia paint. The lady was at paints to point out that Crown accepted no responsibility for the issue and that this was not an issue with their paint. Strange given the available evidence!
In our case the smell seemed to be only prevalent when fresh air was hitting the walls (when we opened patio doors or windows). The smell was not triggered by heat as our central heating did not cause the smell and also direct sunlight was not a cause as our diary showed the smell occurred on some rainy days.
Hopefully this post will help anyone else who experiences this issue and save months of investigation into what might be the cause.
The Amateur Reviewer 