Something seemed fishy.
A young wife in Scotland confessed that her marital bedroom reeked of old fish for weeks before she screwed up the courage to seek advice, The Sun reported.
Now, Claudia Anderson, 26, wishes she hadn’t waited — and is doing her best to warn others of the troubling reason behind the olfactory assault,
What Anderson had worried might have been something embarrassing turned out in fact to be something very dangerous — the unpleasant odor was being caused by an electrical issue that could have caused a fire in her home.
The sheepish spouse, who goes by @mrsclaudiaanderson on TikTok, posted a video of her cautionary tale late last month that has since garnered over 33,000 views.
“Fishy smell in your bedroom? CALL AN ELECTRICIAN!!!,” she wrote in the caption of her video.
“Here’s something I didn’t know about a potential electrical fire hazard until it happened to me,” she said.
“Now, for a few weeks, me and my husband were walking into our bedroom and thinking, ‘oh my God, it stinks of fish in our bedroom,’” she recounted to her viewers.
While the smell was unusual she said she didn’t want to tell anyone about it because she was a “bit embarrassed.”
She thought her plumbing might be the source of the smell, but after checking her bathroom, she didn’t find the culprit.
“So we took out the U bend from the sink, made sure the toilet was super clean, cleaned the plug hole in the shower…everything,” she said.
“But the smell still lingered.”
She then consulted Google to see if she could get to the bottom of the horrid smell.
Finally a lightbulb went on in her head when she read that an electrical problem might be the cause of the olfactory assault.
“I literally would never, ever have guessed that that is what that is…ever,” she says.
“So I messaged my brother-in-law who’s an electrician, and he said, ‘yeah, that’s probably something you should get checked out,’” she recalled.
Luckily, her father-in-law also used to be an electrician, so she called him to inspect her home and he determined a fuse box was the source of the problem.
“There was a wire that had become disconnected, and I don’t know if you can see but it was actually melting the plastic on the inside of the socket,” she said.
“Look at that. That is terrifying! We were so, so lucky that we caught that before that burst into flames,” she added.
She urged people to call an electrician right away should they smell something fishy.
The Post reached out to Anderson for comment.
Commenters below her video thanked her for her warning and some said the same thing had happened to them.
“Fish is an electrical burning smell,” one said.
“I had this — bought an 80s house where nothing had been changed and someone had drilled through cables in the walls, scary,” another chimed in.
Keeping up with fire hazards in the home is nearly a full-time job.
Last year, a dog set its owner’s house on fire when it accidentally turned on a hairdryer that was plugged in on her bed.
A troubling TikTok trend that went viral with young viewers in 2020 also posed a fire risk at home.
The hot fad involved sliding a penny behind a partially plugged-in phone charger, as seen in multiple viral videos circulating on YouTube and TikTok.
While the prank may seem innocuous, the coin can strike the metal prongs, causing “sparks, electrical system damage, and in some cases fire,” Massachusetts Fire Marshall Peter J. Ostroskey warned at the time.
