Two things I would note. Steamcleaning is great but I'm sure that with the ashes and such ground into the carpet they have dropped through down into the carpet mat. I bet the smoke smell is coming from the carpet and that wallpaper in the bathroom (that junk traps smells amazingly well. The ceiling where you didn't paint is going to be a big one as well since obviously smoke rises (I just got done painting my WHOLE house a month or so ago and I feel your pain.... ceilings suck) If your A/C system pulls any air from inside the house (or your heater for that matter) pop off the intake vent and reach in with a paper towel and wipe the side of the walls. If it comes out yellow then you've got nicotene build up on them. Not to mention anythign else in your house with an air inlet (stove, refridgerator etc) will probably have some nicotene build up on it. I've seen it to many times to count on computers that smokers brought in.

 

Spaz ..... Ozone is O3 for starters ..... the Holmes filters are cheap for the charcoal. Technically my ozone gen is an ionizer, but ionizers DO put out a good deal of ozone. A friend of mine has a room about half the size of mine and got the floor standing Ionic Breeze that came with a free bathroom unit. Heset up the big one in the middle of the room and the bathroom one by his computer. It always smelled like band-aids in there and it burned my eyes. He switched to a Holmes unit and a full-size PureAir unit. Much better.

My unit gives my room the sweet taste like after a rain storm in the spring.

 

You engineers are killing me. And to think I started as a mechanical engineering major in college. The reason I changed majors was because the stupid curriculum required Chemistry 2 semesters and Chemistry is not my strong suit. I made the first D of my life in Chem106 in college. If I had started as a business major I probably would have graduated *** Laude at the least (In the end I graduated with a 3.37)
Accounting also screwed me my sophomore year cause I changed majors to that and I absolutely hated it.
Anyways....
sir_nasty, I am sure you are right as well. You told me most things I already knew but did not want to admit becasue they are a royal PITA to do. We also plan on putting hardwood (possibly the imitation stuff that looks like the real deal but won't get damaged by water) floors in the den and dining rooms when we can pony up the dough.
Those two old geezers that moved out probably haveemphysemaby now. At the closing, the old man had a big brown stain on his white mustache where the cigarette obviously went. I cannot imagine smoking that much in a house and not feeling suffocated.
We used to smoke in the piece of crap rental house me and 3 other guys rented in college. At least we aired it out when it got too stuffy!!

 

Ozone in the sense you're talking is correct.. and O3 molecule..
But an ozone generator produces 3 O2 molecules, which are diatomic molecule constructs, but within a certain radius will actually convert to 2 O3 molecules, which is a set of triatomic molecules; thus creating an ozone there's a few other ways to create O2/O3 molecules as well, but the gist is that.

Ionizers should never leave a smell behind (kind of defeats the purpose of negating ions if it's just positively charging them with a smell).. maybe he just had a bunch of bandaids laying around and his original ionizer sucked? lol... i duno, but i've never heard of that...
You CAN however smell the charge in the area of an ionizer if it's strong enough, and you should almost always (on a passive system) feel o2/o3 plowing through the cortex of your charge-plate.

As for the charcoal, all i know is i used to have this older honeywell pos that had a charcoal filter, and it was $55 to replace the damn thing, and it only lasted 2-3 mo...

after that i looked for a simple, passive, and inexpensive solution that i didn't mind trashing in the event it died.

also, it's a dimmer lamp which is cool to have around the house to set ambient light... but that was just personal preference.

 

Hopefully this doesn't spark yet another huge discussion but even the imitation hardwood will get damaged by water, not usually as quickly as real hardwood but feestanding water or water that gets underneath it can cause it to buckle and then it's kind of a pain to rip up. I've got it all over my new house and I love it but chips out of it suck, make sure it gets installed right too.

 

Being an insurance adjuster I shouldn't have left that statement so vague. By "not damaged by water" I meant you can clean it with a mop if you want to, whereas it may not be too smart to do that with real hardwood! It is also like 1/3 of the price of real hardwood, which is a selling point on its own. I thought about installing it myself when we get it, but I think I would rather pay someone to do it cause I know it would be a PITA to do alone.
My dad had some installed in his house and it is great. When you walk on it or knock on it with your hand it even sounds like real wood. I cannot tell the difference. It took hisRottweiler a little while to get used to itthough. The dog still slips all over the place if he tries to get anywhere fast!
We have also thought about simply ripping up the carpet and staining the concrete. A lot of people around here do that. Any home built after about 1970 in MS is built on a slab, so there's concrete underneath all the floors. It actually looks really good too once you put down some area rugs.

 

Self installing that stuff is actually quite easy, I had a bunch of un-experienced high school kids (with a little assistance) do most of my floor. The main thing that you need is a nice carbide tipped blade and a good chop saw. It slides in/snaps into place (the type we did) then you just smack it over sow the end groves slide together.

As for the water thing I get what you are saying. They do however clean the best with VERY VERY minimal water on a pad, from what I've been told/read a swiffer with the wet pad works the best (not the wetjet thing) and they're cheap.

Start pricing it out, don't forget to include the price of your trim (you have to obviously pull up the old stuff) and the foam underlayment padding stuff....

Here's what I've got: (depending on your screen settings it's actually a touch more red and little darker)

http://www.floormall.com/laminates/q...select_cherry/

How-To

http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/fc_bri...386209,00.html

 

A friend of mine recently redid his floors with a bamboo flooring. He said that it was pretty cheap and easy to install.

Spaz: It smelled like Band-Aids because they use O3 sterilization in the plants that they make them. Also, if ionizers don't produce ozone, why do Ionic Breeze units have the catalyst and why did they offer the catalyst to existing owners after they lost a class-action suit for ozone generation above safe limits???

Jon .... I'll also add that you can buy coil cleaner to clean the evaporator coil of the AC .... that condenses water and guess what else. It's aluminum with copper tubes, so it should come clean pretty easilly. If you can't find it, I'd thnk that any real strong cleaner would work with a spray bottle.

The ceilings, the wall paper and the carpet pads are likely culprits here as noted.

 

how about febreze? i don't smoke, but my roommate is a pig and farts all day long and leaves the food rotten on his room, and the smell in his bedroom scares away even my gf... this is what i use... Febreeze!

 

Haha! I had a roommate exactly like that in the crapped up house we rented in college! He used to go for like a week without taking showers. His room was the only one on the opposite side of the house and we kept the door closed at all times. No one dared ever open that door. Yeah I've used febreeze. I am pretty convined the remainder of the ceilings, the wallpaper, and the carpet pad are probably the culprits.
One thing that really sucks is we have crown molding covering about 1/2 of the tops of the walls in the house. I am probably going to have to eventually seal and paint that too. I am 99% sure it was originally painted with OIL paint, so I'll have to re-paint it with oil paint. that is really going to suck the big one. Anyone who has ever had the "privilege" of painting with oil paint will understand.

Falkore you're losing me....I have no idea how to clean the evaporator coil of the AC. AC units are a bit out of my league.