For quite a while I have noticed an unpleasant odor in our basement. The strange thing about it was that (a) it was never there when I would first go down to the basement, and (b) it began after I had been in the basement for, oh maybe five minutes or so, and (c) it was confined to one section of the basement.
I have even asked people about it, people who might know, like hardware store employees, and a handyman. They looked at me like I was losing my mind. I feared that the basement needed some drastic cleaning, like bleach on all the walls and floors. I dreaded doing a job like that.
A few days ago I was down in the basement, and made the determination that the odor was like fish that had passed its prime. Then I went to the computer and Googled "Fishy basement odor."
What do you know! Someone else had the same problem and had figured it out. When plastic light fixtures like the one in the picture below get old and begin to deteriorate, they emit a fishy odor. It happens after the light has been on long enough for the fixture to heat up. I unscrewed our fixture and smelled it. Sure enough, it smelled really fishy, and not in a good way.
It is such a joy to solve a problem like this! I haven't been this happy since we had the dead raccoon removed from the window well.
