Smelly Lifts, Stale Corridors, Bin Rooms You Can Smell Three Floors Up: How One Condo Manager Ended the Complaints in a Single Weekend

When odor in the common areas becomes the loudest item on the AGM agenda and the reason owners start withholding service fees, patching it with air freshener is not a strategy. A building manager in Huai Khwang, Bangkok explains what finally worked.

The Friday Night the Residents' Group Chat Passed 100 Messages

Wirat, 46, manages a 29-storey, 438-unit condominium off Pracha Uthit Road in Huai Khwang, Bangkok. The building went up eleven years ago and was once the project everyone in the neighbourhood wanted a piece of. A thirty-square-metre unit used to rent within three days of being listed.

Then came a Friday night in late July. Wirat's phone would not stop buzzing. The residents' group chat, normally so quiet he half forgot it existed, ran past a hundred messages in two hours. Every one of them was about the same thing: the smell.

A resident on the 12th floor posted a photo of the lift floor with a trail of drips across it and wrote, "I pay more than two thousand baht a month in fees and I have to hold my breath in my own lift." Someone on the 19th said that opening her front door in the morning brought in something that smelled like stagnant drain water. A resident on the 7th said the rubbish room beside the fire stairs was strong enough that a visiting friend asked, quite seriously, how anyone lived there. And then one line landed that kept Wirat awake all night: "If nothing changes by next month, I'm holding back my service fee."

Wirat has spent eighteen years in building management. He knows that an odor problem is never only an odor problem. It is a confidence problem. The moment owners start to feel that management has lost control of the building, everything else follows: late payments, hostile questions at the annual general meeting, and a push to replace the committee.

So on Saturday morning he did something he had not done properly in two years. He walked the entire building himself, from the car park up to the roof deck, with a torch and a notebook. What he found explained exactly why spraying air freshener every morning had never been enough.

What a Full Walk-Through of the Building Revealed

The main bin room in the basement. Six large wheeled bins stood in a bare concrete room served by a single extract fan, and that fan was turning noticeably slowly because its motor was near the end of its life. The floor was permanently damp from liquid leaking out of bin bags. Dark lines ran along every tile grout joint. When Wirat pointed his torch at the gypsum ceiling, he saw grey-green blotches spreading in rings. That was mold, growing on board that had been absorbing moisture for years.

The floor-level refuse cupboards. Every floor has a small room beside the fire stairs where residents leave their bags and the housekeeping team collects twice a day. In practice, some bags sat overnight. Some leaked. That liquid found the joints between tiles and soaked into the screed underneath. The smell was no longer coming from the rubbish. It was coming from the building itself.

The lifts. Four passenger lifts make more than two thousand trips a day between them. The floors are finished with a removable carpet insert, and that carpet had absorbed everything anyone ever dropped on it: bin liquid, rain off umbrellas, melted ice from drink bags, pet hair. Housekeeping wiped the lift floors daily, but wiping only ever touches the surface. Whatever had worked its way down into the pile had never been reached.

The corridors. This building has enclosed corridors fed by a pressurisation system, with no openable windows. When air escapes from a floor's refuse cupboard, it has nowhere to go. It circulates in the corridor, and every time a lift door opens it gets drawn into the shaft and distributed up and down the building like an upside-down chimney.

The facilities everyone was proud of on launch day. The gym on level 8 held a stale sweat smell locked into the bench upholstery and the rubber matting. The library, air conditioned around the clock and almost never used, had that damp-paper odor everyone recognises instantly. Wirat stood in the middle of it and thought: if I were a buyer being shown this building today, I would walk out.

Why Common-Area Odor Costs Far More Than People Assume

The health cost

What people call "a bad smell" is, in practical terms, a mixture of gases produced as microorganisms break down organic matter, plus airborne mold spores. Anyone walking a corridor or standing in a lift is breathing that in. A healthy adult may register nothing more than irritation or a mild headache. For small children, older residents, people with allergies, and anyone with a weakened immune system, the effect is far more obvious.

One family in Wirat's building has a four-year-old with asthma. His mother said that every time they waited any length of time on a floor next to the refuse cupboard, he would cough in bursts and wheeze that night. In another unit, a 78-year-old woman who uses a wheelchair had simply stopped going down to the garden on level 8, because reaching it meant a corridor that, in her words, made her chest feel tight. That is the real damage. Odor does not just annoy people. It stops them using the facilities they are paying to maintain.

The financial cost

Wirat put the numbers in front of the committee. The building collects roughly eight million baht a year in service charges when collection runs at full rate. If even ten per cent of owners delay payment out of frustration, that is eight hundred thousand baht of cash flow gone, which is enough to push the water-pump overhaul and the exterior repaint out by a full year.

Then there is the cost nobody puts in a spreadsheet. Three property agents working the neighbourhood told Wirat plainly that they had become reluctant to bring buyers to this building, because clients tended to go quiet the moment they stepped into the lift. Resale prices here were running about four thousand baht per square metre below comparable buildings of the same age within a five-hundred-metre radius. On a thirty-square-metre unit, that is a hundred and twenty thousand baht, quietly taken off every owner's asset.

The reputational and social cost

Smell turns neighbours against each other. Upper-floor residents accused lower floors of not tying their bin bags. Pet owners were blamed for something they had nothing to do with. The committee was accused of hiring the cheapest cleaning contractor available, and the housekeeping staff, who worked harder than anyone in the building, took most of the criticism, even though no amount of mopping was ever going to fix this.

On condo review sites and in local Facebook groups, the building's rating drifted downwards. The most-liked comment was one short sentence: "Great location, well built, but the smell in the lifts is unacceptable." Thousands of people read that, and nobody at the management office could delete it.

The cost in time

In the three months before that Friday, Wirat estimates he spent around forty hours on odor complaints alone: replying in the chat, meeting residents, calling in a pest control company, calling in plumbers to check the stacks, and writing reports for the committee. Forty hours that should have gone into fire safety, planned maintenance and budgeting.

Why the Usual Fixes Never Finish the Job

Air freshener and automatic scent diffusers. This is what every building buys first. It works for about forty minutes. After that the original smell comes back and mixes with the fragrance, producing something a lot of residents describe as worse than the original. The human nose is far better at picking apart layered odors than we give it credit for. Masking does nothing whatsoever to the bacteria or the mold spores. It simply adds another airborne compound for people to breathe.

Mopping with disinfectant. Genuinely useful on smooth, accessible surfaces, and it should continue. But the odor is not only on the floor. It is in grout lines, in the pores of bare screed, in lift carpet fibres, in the ceiling board, in service risers and in the air itself. A mop reaches only what the cloth touches, and using too much water can raise humidity, which is exactly what mold feeds on.

More frequent rubbish collection. Wirat did this first and was right to. But it only controls what arrives from today onwards. It does nothing about eleven years of accumulation. You could remove every bag in the building this afternoon and the bin room would still smell tomorrow morning, because the odor has soaked into the fabric of the structure.

Propping doors open to "air the place out". It sounds sensible. In a tall building with a natural stack effect, opening the wrong door pulls basement air straight up to the upper floors. Wirat once had the fire stair doors held open for a week as an experiment. Complaints from floor 20 and above doubled.

Stripping out and repainting. Effective, and extremely expensive. Replacing the bin room ceilings throughout, re-carpeting every lift and repainting the corridors was quoted at over a million baht, plus weeks of noise and dust for residents. Worse, without dealing with what is living deeper in the materials first, the new paint would start staining again inside one to two years.

What Wirat actually needed was a method that reached everywhere at once, treated the air and not just surfaces, did not wet lift control panels or gym equipment, left nothing behind for residents to breathe, and finished quickly enough not to disrupt 438 households.

What He Chose: Ozone Disinfection by World Health Disinfection

The suggestion came from a committee member who works at a five-star hotel. She said her property had been using ozone treatment for years on guest rooms with stubborn cigarette odor, and that nothing else they had tried came close. So Wirat contacted World Health Disinfection, better known as WHD, which provides residential and building disinfection using ozone gas produced by a Master Ozone Generator.

The principle is simple and powerful. Ozone, O3, is an unstable three-atom form of oxygen. Dispersed through a space, it oxidises the cell walls of bacteria, the protein coats of viruses and the spores of mold, breaking those structures apart at molecular level so they can no longer function. At the same time it attacks the molecules responsible for odor. This is not masking. The odor molecules themselves are broken down.

What makes this so well suited to a condominium is that ozone is a gas. It travels wherever air travels: into grout lines, under lift carpet, into ceiling voids, along tile joints, and into the corners a mop will never see. When the work is done, the ozone naturally reverts to ordinary oxygen, O2, so there is no chemical residue for residents to worry about, nothing to wipe down afterwards, and no risk of soaking furniture or electronics.

The process takes about 30 minutes per area

1. First 2 minutes. The technician positions the unit, starts it and sets the intensity to suit the size and character of the space. A heavily soiled bin room needs a different setting from a library.
2. Next 12 minutes. Ozone distributes throughout the area, flowing into corners, under seating, through carpet fibres and into air pockets that are otherwise unreachable.
3. Next 12 minutes. The purification phase, where pathogens are destroyed and odor molecules are broken down at molecular level. Viruses, bacteria and mold spores are dealt with here.
4. Final 4 minutes. The system pauses, allowing ozone to revert to oxygen. The technician then ventilates the space and reopens it for normal use.

Wirat and the team planned the work across a Saturday and Sunday, in rotating blocks. They began with the basement bin room at first light, then worked through the floor-level refuse cupboards in groups of four floors, then the lifts one at a time, taking each car out of service for half an hour while residents used the other three. The gym, library and residents' lounge were done in the evening. He gave residents five days' notice by group chat and printed notices, with a clear timetable of which lift was available when.

10 Reasons Ozone Treatment Suits Condominium Common Areas

1. It reaches what people cannot. Because the treatment works as a gas, it penetrates grout joints, carpet backing, ceiling voids and the space behind control cabinets, none of which a cleaning cloth will ever touch.
2. It deals with the cause rather than covering it. This approach breaks down odor molecules directly, unlike fragrance systems that simply stack a new smell on top of the old one.
3. Nothing is left behind in shared spaces. Since ozone reverts to oxygen, there is no residue for children or older residents using the common areas to come into contact with.
4. Equipment is not put at risk. The method uses no water and leaves no surface wet, so lift button panels, CCTV units, gym machines and library books are all safe.
5. Each area is out of service only briefly. With a roughly thirty-minute cycle, management can close off one zone at a time with almost no impact on daily life in the building.
6. The equipment is independently tested. The Master Ozone Generator used by WHD is certified and tested by Thailand's Department of Medical Sciences and by Intertek in the United Kingdom.
7. It outperforms conventional methods. According to Intertek testing, it is ten times more effective than standard cleaning approaches, a figure that is easy to present to a committee and to owners.
8. It handles pathogens and odor together. The treatment addresses viruses including SARS-CoV-2, bacteria at over 99.9 per cent, and mold spores at up to 99.99 per cent in air-conditioner units, while clearing rubbish, smoke, pet and stale-air odors.
9. It reduces allergens in air everybody shares. In a building housing both small children and elderly residents, cutting irritants in corridors and lifts is a tangible quality-of-life improvement.
10. It is evidence of care that you can communicate. More than 300 organisations already rely on WHD, among them five-star properties including The Ritz-Carlton, Fraser Suites, Andaz and Dusit International, alongside hospitals, schools, offices and factories. Residents understand instantly what it means to be held to a five-star hotel standard.

Before and After

In the Manager's Own Words

"Eighteen years in building management, and I honestly believed odor was a question of effort. Work the housekeeping team harder, add collection rounds, and the smell goes away. I was wrong about that for eighteen years.

When the WHD technician came to survey, he didn't start by selling me anything. He walked the bin room with me, pointed his torch at the ceiling and explained how long that mold had probably been growing there. Then he told me straight that this would have to be split into several cycles and that nobody could be in the area while the machine ran. I liked that he led with the limitations instead of the benefits.

On the Sunday evening I rode the last lift as it came back into service. I stood in there alone and took a deep breath. There was nothing. Not perfume, not disinfectant. Nothing at all. I rode it up to 29 and then pressed the button and rode it all the way back down again.

What I didn't expect was the AGM. This year was the first in five years where not a single owner raised their hand about the smell. One lady stood up instead to say that she can sit in the level 8 garden every evening again. I had to look away for a moment."

— Wirat, condominium building manager, Huai Khwang, Bangkok

Make Your Common Areas a Selling Point, Not a Complaint

Lifts, corridors, bin rooms, gyms or any shared space where the smell simply will not go away: World Health Disinfection will survey the building and plan a schedule that disrupts residents as little as possible.

See service & pricing – click here

Call 065-556-6294  |  LINE: @whd268

Email worldhealthdisinfection@gmail.com

Questions Building Managers Ask

1. Do all the lifts have to be taken out of service at once?

No. They are normally treated one car at a time so residents can keep using the rest. Since each cycle runs about thirty minutes, rotating through them over a weekend is straightforward. Give residents advance notice and post a clear timetable showing which lift is available when.

2. Can residents stay in their own units while common areas are treated?

Yes, normally. The work is confined to a controlled area, such as a lift taken out of service or a bin room with the door closed. What is not allowed is people, pets or plants being inside the space being treated. The technician cordons off the area, stays with the equipment throughout, and reopens the space only after the pause and ventilation.

3. How long before the smell comes back?

Ozone deals with the pathogens and odor molecules present on the day. If the underlying cause remains, such as bags sitting overnight or a failed extract fan, new odor will start to accumulate again. Pair the treatment with fixing the system: replace the extract fan motor, add collection rounds, and schedule repeat treatments. Most buildings settle on once or twice a year for common areas.

4. Will it damage lift buttons, CCTV or other electronics?

The process works with gas, not water, so nothing gets wet and there is no residue to wipe off afterwards. The technician surveys the space and sets the intensity appropriately for the materials in each area before starting.

5. Can we use this in our annual report to owners?

Yes, and you should. Record the dates, the areas treated and the number of cycles in the annual report, and note that the Master Ozone Generator is certified and tested by the Department of Medical Sciences and by Intertek. Clear documentation makes next year's budget approval considerably easier.

6. Our building is over ten years old. Will it still work?

Yes. What is being treated is the accumulated microbial load and odor molecules, not the age of the structure. In older buildings where odor has soaked in deeply, the contrast afterwards tends to be even more striking. That said, if there is active water ingress or moisture-damaged ceiling board, repair that alongside the treatment so humidity does not create a fresh problem.

Further Reading and References

• Ozone cleaning and disinfection service
• WHD full disinfection services
• Removing odors and chemical residue with ozone

External resources: Department of Medical Sciences, Ministry of Public Health and U.S. EPA Indoor Air Quality

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