All Of A Damn Sudden It Smells Like Fertilizer In Here

This smell came suddenly Saturday night.  I turned on the family space heater, like I usually do, and slowly it dawned on me: It smells like fertilizer in my bedroom.  But I didn't know 100% whether it was coming from my space heater or from the central heat in the house, which clicked on and off throughout the night.

I was hoping it would have gone away when I went in for overtime at work yesterday/Sunday.  But once I entered the front door, that same damn smell of fertilizer hit my nose, and even harder than the night before.  It was so bad, I turned off the heat and cracked open the windows in my bedroom and in the dining room in an effort to shoo away the smell.  I did so even though it was just below freezing (although that is relative since it felt about twenty degrees warmer than it did a night or two before).  I fell asleep with the window open; I was working on an hour's sleep when I went to work, so my body was shutting down regardless of how cold it was ... well, until my cold feet woke me up about two hours after I went to take a nap.

I looked up, by the way, "smells coming from my central heat" on Google.  One website says to check the furnace filters for mold and mildew.  Another thinks it's close enough to a rotten egg smell that it could be an imminent natural gas leak.  I would like to think that if it were a natural gas leak, the mercaptan smell would be so overwhelming that I had no choice but to get out of the house.  This smell of fertilizer, which is similar but not the same, is noticeable but not overpowering.  As noxious as it may be, I'm not forced out of my house and into the cold because of the smell.  Then again, I'm weird and so I could be wrong, in which case this could be the last-ever blog post of Wailing And Failing.

Anyway, when I woke up I shut both windows, turned on the heat and plugged in my heater.  Although it wasn't as pronounced, pretty soon I smelled that damn fertilizer scent again.  And I smelled it even more when I went out to eat late last/Sunday night; the foyer was reeking of that scent even worse than it did in the afternoon.

So I'm in a bind.  I don't want to be slowly asphyxiated by the fertilizer smell, but I also need to stay warm.  Meanwhile, I can't find a culprit.  The furnace filters seem to look just fine, and I switched them up only several days ago anyway.  After eating out I went to the backyard to see if, say, an animal got into the external unit; I thought I heard some caterwauling coming from outside in the evening.  But I didn't see any holes or bloody animal carcasses anywhere.

The only clue that might lead me somewhere is that the space heater isn't working as it usually does.  My Father seemed to have busted off the on/off switch, so the only way you can turn this thing on is if you plug it in.  When you do, it usually whirrs to life.  But it's plugged in now and I can't hear anything.  If you get really close you can feel the heat, but it's not emitting anything I can feel from my bed a few feet away.  This change in the heater happened when I plugged it in after shutting the bedroom door yesterday afternoon, so that could coincide with this fertilizer smell I'm smelling.  But that doesn't explain how in the hell I smell fertilizer at the front door.

I don't want to call anyone to check, like, the air ducts for a dead rodent.  I'm now just hoping this goes away.  Cross your fingers burying my head in the sand works.