Mothballs and a bad idea...

[pgringo]

what is present in your car is more than just an odor. there are actual fumes in there. let it air out. beyond that, i put one of these in each of my current vehicles: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

i have two smelly smelly dogs, and those wagan units have killed the dog smell in our vehicles.

[DMCVegas]

Just one word of caution on safety with charcoal: as it is an oxygen scavenger, just be sure to keep the area well ventilated when you are using it.

Nikolay Zelinsky frowns upon your shenanigans.

[Ron]

Just one word of caution on safety with charcoal: as it is an oxygen scavenger, just be sure to keep the area well ventilated when you are using it. You can put it in the interior of your car, just ensure you open the doors and give it a few minutes to have some fresh air from your open garage door to get in there. You aren't likely going to be working with a big volume of the stuff, but it's chemical properties remain the same at any volume.

It is used often in the water treatment industry as a carbon filter for removing chlorine, for example. Loading a few hundred cubic feet into a large vessel (confined space) can be dangerous if you are not prepared. Especially if you are the guy in the vessel getting the bags lowered down to him.

+1 on moth balls under the car, not inside. Put them in an aluminum pie plate and then slide that under the car or put them near the wheels.

Charcoal in air purifiers are "activated" by being treated with oxygen (to open up the pores). I doubt there is any kind of hazard here as it is the main component in many military gas masks (closed systems)...

[StainlessBullet]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

I picked up some charcoal and baking soda today. Hopefully in a few weeks the odor will be gone. I’ll let everyone know how it goes. When I put the mothballs in the car, I had no idea just how strong the smell would be. Although, it is better than chewed wires and the smell of mouse piss.

[Jonathan]

Yea, I am going to have to go back through some materials and see what aspect of the oxygen depleting attribute there are warnings about. It could quite possibly have been related to how when you load a large volume of this sort of media (and it wouldn't be this exact charcoal persay, but perhaps anthracite or granulated carbon), you make a lot of dust. It could be the somewhat toxic dust in the air that isn't a good idea to breath in rather than the air alone having the O2 concentration decreased. Let me try to get back to you on that one...

[DMCVegas]

Coal DUST is dangerous, yes. Exposure over time can cause Pneumoconiosis, or "Black Lung", a condition that miners used to be contract quite often. And still do in coal mines in some other countries.

Coal dust is also very flammable. Take a cube, and measure the surface area of each of the six sides. Each side is flammable because it is exposed to oxygen. Fire of course needs heat, oxygen, and fuel to all be present in order to have a flame. Split the cube in half and you've now exposed more surface area, and thus increased the flammability factor of the same volume of coal by 33%. Keep dividing the same coal until you end up with floating particulate matter (dust) that will catch fire far quicker to the point where it is simply explosive.

Of course if you apply this theory to a liquid such as gasoline, you can understand why fuel injectors spray gas out into a mist and why when they get clogged and have a poor spray pattern, your engine runs poorly.

[Jonathan]

Coal dust is also very flammable. Take a cube, and measure the surface area of each of the six sides. Each side is flammable because it is exposed to oxygen. Fire of course needs heat, oxygen, and fuel to all be present in order to have a flame. Split the cube in half and you've now exposed more surface area, and thus increased the flammability factor of the same volume of coal by 33%. Keep dividing the same coal until you end up with floating particulate matter (dust) that will catch fire far quicker to the point where it is simply explosive.

Definitely. Kind of like the "fuel, air, spark" idea we often apply to figuring out why your car won't start, that same "fire triangle" theory applies to combustion in general. If we increase the surface area being exposed to the oxygen, it becomes much more likely to catch fire or combust.

Kind of like how you can do that with the powdered coffee creamer. Look on YouTube for "coffee creamer fire".

I won't copy a link here to those videos of guys showing this trick in hopes of not encouraging other morons to try burning their apartment building down. Funny, if some of these guys would have gone to their physics or chemistry class instead of the beer store, they might not need to do these science experiments in their 20s or 30s.

[Ron]

FWIW- The Fire Triangle is old school. A fourth requirement has been discovered/added and a Fire Tetrahedron is now used-

FireTetrahedron.jpg

[Jonathan]

FWIW- The Fire Triangle is old school. A fourth requirement has been discovered/added and a Fire Tetrahedron is now used-

FireTetrahedron.jpg

I see five triangles there... hehe

[Ron]

Just for you, bud...
FireTetrahedron2.jpg