Strange Odour

[mshippest]

For about three years I have been noticing an unusual odour around the pool, usually when I am in the water. The smell is swampy, or like compost, but no one could notice it except me. (Everyone says I am part hound due to my exceptional sense of smell.). For the last few years we have been contacting our neighbours to ask about whether or not they had a compost bin that needed some attention. Today I was cleaning the coping and the edge of the pool, and realized that the odour I have been smelling all these years is actually coming from the gap area underneath the coping. The chemistry of the water itself is perfect, the water is clear, and we just shocked it a few days ago. The smell is definitely coming from around the top of the fibreglass wall under the coping, not the water itself. Has anybody experienced this and do you know what to do? Thank you so much .

 

[JoyfulNoise]

Dead animal possibly?

Does anyone around you use poison bait? It’s a terrible idea and, if you’re lucky, the dying animal will go back to its burrow. Sadly, many do not and unintended secondary kills occur usually in sensitive predator populations.

Perhaps when the pool was being built one of the contractors had a few too many tacos for lunch and there wasn’t a bathroom nearby so …

 

[mshippest]

Dead animal possibly?

Does anyone around you use poison bait? It’s a terrible idea and, if you’re lucky, the dying animal will go back to its burrow. Sadly, many do not and unintended secondary kills occur usually in sensitive predator populations.

Perhaps when the pool was being built one of the contractors had a few too many tacos for lunch and there wasn’t a bathroom nearby so …

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. I don’t believe that it is a dead animal as something large enough to continue to smell for this many years would not fit between the coping and the top of the fiberglass. The pool was built five years ago, so I also don’t think that it was used as a bathroom on the fly. Our home is built on the shores of a prehistoric lake, which obviously is no more, so the entire city we live in is very sandy. That’s why I can’t imagine that there’s any kind of water pooling behind the fibreglass. I’m really at a loss. The odour is definitely organic and not of an animal source. I think it’s worse each year.

 

[Newdude]

Got a pic of the gap ? Just because the area is sandy doesn't mean that specific area drains well. There could be a buried chunk of concrete that the workers were too lazy to remove, or many other possibilities.

Maybe something burrowed to to the other side of the cavity and then died.

Maybe it's stagnant sludge.

Can you caulk the gap ?

 

[JoyfulNoise]

I think this unfortunately falls under the category of “your guess is as good as ours”. Clearly it’s a faint odor as you seem to be the most sensitive to it. Perhaps during the build so organic material was dumped in a ditch near the pool that would then eventually get covered up - roots or stumps from removed vegetation, other organic garbage, etc. And that material is just slowly decomposing. Unless you intend to start digging up that area to investigate, there’s little you can do to mitigate it.

One thing to make sure of though is that there is no water leak from the pool in that area. Here where I live, our soil is heavy clay and organic matter. It smells horrible when it’s wet (at least to me it does). Not a pleasant earthy smell at all. When the ground is dry, you can’t smell anything. Perhaps the ground in that area is staying damp for some reason and your smelling the “earthy aromas” …

 

[Oly]

Your situation may be related to your location and the "prehistoric lake". Natural lakes accumulate large amounts of organic matter that decompose over time and release gasses through the soil profile into the atmosphere. Do some research specific to your area and you may find this is a known phenomenon. If this is the case you may not have many options and sealing the gap with a flexible caulking is worth a try.