this site may harm your health, part... whatever

I cleaned up some parts of the floor, and also the top of the refrigerator where I had had the bottles of Clorox and other cleaning stuff. I moved some things around which I thought might have had spilled chemicals on them. A couple of things I set out on the porch.

Well, as a test, I've still been walking around and inhaling the air in different parts of the house to see if I can locate a source of the fumes. Now that I've eliminated some possible sources, it's easier to be sure that I know where it's coming from.

There is now a big 'DO NOT' on my list. Do not open the door of the electric water heater closet and inhale the air for a couple minutes to test and see if that's where the fumes are coming from. Because that is, indeed, where the fumes are coming from.

But it had a delayed effect. I felt relatively okay at first. There was some irritation in my throat. It was after I had shut the door, walked away, sat down, and tried to eat something.

I felt pain in my lungs that didn't go away. I expected it to fade quickly. I then gradually become more nauseated over the next few minutes and felt dizzy like I would pass out.

I called my landlord to ask him if he had sprayed anything in there at all when he came to check for frozen pipes a few weeks ago. He said no, he hadn't.

Here is my explanation. It might have been a couple of things happening at once. First, when he came in, I moved some junk out of the way, kicking over a bottle of household cleaner that was on the floor, which rolled over to another area where some other stuff had leaked/spilled. That might have set off some fumes. I cleaned that up as well as I could.

Next, the door to the water heater was open for a long time. And the cold winter winds are blowing through the cracks and holes in the walls, and I see there are holes in the places where the pipes go through, in the closet. So when the drafts blow, it blows anything that is in the closet out. I've done better when that door has been closed, but it was really bad when the door was open. So there might actually be two separate places where fumes seem to be coming from.

I cleaned up the only things that I had control over, but I can't do anything about the mystery fumes in the water heater closet. It seems to be what the heater itself is made of. Either that or something used to put it together. I smelled something from the top of the water heater itself. There were drops of melted metal solder, and some kind of dust that looked like it fell from above when somebody drilled something. I don't see any 'openly visible' chemicals that jump out at you. It seems to be coming from the material itself that something is made of. Maybe when it heats up, it releases some kind of fumes.

So having that door open for a couple days, and having drafty winds blowing through that closet, has made it worse. But that's not the whole explanation and I still don't understand.

Maybe it's a particulate dust instead of a gas. Then, it settled all over the house. Every time the wind blows, the dust is stirred up. It could be coming out of the walls through the holes, or coming off the water heater itself. I don't know. It seemed to get better after I vacuumed. Vacuuming was one of the things that I have done in working on the house myself.

I did actually get a few friends who responded to my request for help, but I haven't actually accepted their offers yet. I wanted to try to troubleshoot it myself a little more and do whatever I could.