Why Does the Office Still Smell After Cleaning?
By Tommy Bachus · Director of Operations Pinellas Park, Fla. — 2 min read
A cleaning round can only reach what it can touch. When a building smells musty the morning after it was cleaned, the source is usually somewhere no cleaner goes.
Cleaning surfaces cannot reach the source
A musty smell that survives cleaning is information. It means the odour is not coming from the surfaces that were just cleaned, and cleaning them harder or more often will not change it.
Work through the possibilities in order of likelihood, not in order of what is easiest to clean. The most common answer is also the one furthest from a mop.
The HVAC system is the usual answer
Air handling is the first place to look. Growth on cooling coils, standing water in a drain pan, or debris in ductwork all produce odour, and the ventilation system then distributes it evenly through every room, which is why the smell seems to have no source.
Restoration and environmental firms publishing on this, BELFOR and Atlantic Environmental among them, describe the mechanism the same way: sustained relative humidity above about 60 per cent makes ductwork and filters hospitable, and microbial growth emits volatile organic compounds. Geosmin is the one responsible for the earthy, damp note most people describe as musty.
To be explicit about where our work stops: mold assessment and mold remediation are licensed trades in Florida and we hold neither license. If a smell traces to an air handler or to a water event, that is an assessor's job, and we will say so rather than clean around it.
The places a standard round misses
When the air handling is sound, the remaining candidates are the things a nightly scope was never written to include.
- Floor drains, in restrooms, break areas and janitorial closets.
- Carpet backing and pad, where an old spill can hold odour long after the surface reads clean.
- Break room appliances, and the seals and drip trays inside them.
- Soft furniture and fabric panels, which absorb and re-release.
- Restroom grout, which is porous and is its own subject.
- Trash rooms and the compactor area, where the floor holds more of it than the bins do.
Florida makes this ordinary rather than unusual
For much of the year outdoor dewpoints here keep indoor relative humidity high unless a building is actively dehumidifying well. A building that is not will smell damp regardless of how good its cleaning schedule is, and the honest first move is to check the humidity rather than to add cleaning hours.
Where the cause is accumulated soil in the places above, that is a deep clean with a defined scope. Do it once properly instead of adding it to a nightly round that has no time for it.