“Neighbor using an industrial fryer in his row house making my home smell terrible/fire hazard?”

Photo by Joanna Hiatt Kim

“Dear PoPville,

We live in a row house and share a brick party wall with our neighbor. We’ve already had some issues with his property causing issues on ours (not going into detail here, but essentially upkeep failures). All that’s to say we already don’t have a great relationship.

For the past few months our neighbor has been using an industrial frier in his home (in the warmer months the frier was in his backyard) causing our whole house to smell like fry oil for most of the day, we’re talking windowless diner levels of fry oil smell. We think he sells food, which is why it’s going all day. We’re also concerned about this being a massive fire hazard. We’ve bought an air purifier which helps whichever room it’s in, but isn’t really a whole house solution. There doesn’t appear to be much info on the DC OAG website. Do we have any sort of legal recourse?”