5 Ways to Keep Your Home From Smelling Like Weed

True stoners know that not everybody appreciates the unique and pungent smells that come out of a loud bag of chronic. Maybe you have roommates or neighbors who aren’t 420 friendly. Maybe you just want to improve your own air quality and stop smelling like weed all the time. No matter the specifics of your situation, stinky bud can be a big problem! If your cannabis is stinking up your house or dorm room, you may be wondering how to mask the smell from the rest of the house or avoid it altogether. Here are five tried-and-true ways to keep your home from smelling like weed.

Smoke outside or blow smoke out the window

It may seem like a pretty obvious answer, but the best way to keep weed from stinking up the house is to (you guessed it) avoid smoking it in the house. However, that isn’t always an option. While cannabis is legal for recreational use in DC, you’re not really supposed to be out in the open smoking it. In fact, that could warrant complaints from your neighbors, and in harsher situations, a run-in with the police or a fine. In this case, discretion is key. You can usually smoke outside on your own property so long as you’re not out there doing it in broad daylight while the neighbor kids play in their back yard.

If you don’t have a private balcony, garage, parked vehicle, or yard to escape to, your next best option is to smoke in the house and exhale through an open window. Try to avoid smoking mediums that burn continually, like joints or blunts. You can’t catch all the smoke in your lungs to blow out the window, so a lot of it will sit in the room and linger, ultimately stinking up your house. By sticking to bongs and bowls, you can inhale all of the smoke into your lungs and blow it straight out the window.

Mask the smell

If switching smoking mediums is out of the question, and you can’t seem to find the appropriate time to go outside, you can always cover the weed smell up. For one thing, you should always store cannabis in odor-proof glass jars to protect your weed from drying out while also keeping the smell in. Air fresheners like Febreeze or incense sticks work great for spot treating the odors. You can also run an essential oil diffuser to mask the smell. In fact, many cannabis aficionados swear by adding cannabis terpenes like pinene or limonene to essential oil diffusers to both cover the smell and promote aromatherapeutic benefits.

Sometimes all it takes is running a load of laundry or cooking something in the kitchen. A surefire way to mask the smell is by microwaving a bag of popcorn until it just starts to burn. Semi-burnt popcorn is still edible, but it’ll mask the smell entirely. You can also limit your smoke sessions to the bathroom. Running the shower and bathroom fan while you smoke can help dissipate odors quickly.

Last but not least, keeping the smell off of your skin and clothes can help the air quality in your home. You don’t have to jump in the shower every time you hit the bong or anything, but washing your hands always helps. Keeping a pack of gum handy helps with keeping the smell off of your breath. You can also use Febreeze to eliminate odors on your clothes.

Covering the smell is easy if you’re not smoking a lot. However, if you’re hotboxing your little apartment day in and day out, Febreeze just isn’t gonna cut it. If you’re smoking a lot, see number 5.

Use a homemade sploof or Smoke Buddy

An older trick for masking the smell comes in the form of a sploof. A sploof is an empty toilet paper or paper towel tube with a dryer sheet attached to the end. The idea is to smoke weed as you usually would, but exhale the smoke through the sploof tube. The result is smoke that smells like clean laundry instead of smoke that smells like your average smoke sesh.

A Smoke Buddy is a more refined version of a sploof. It is designed to act as a personal smoke filter so you can be discreet on the go. It’s made with hard plastic, and it’s usually good for about 300 hits before you’ll need to replace the filter. The dryer sheet used on a sploof will need to be replaced much more frequently.

Get a few houseplants or a carbon air filter

If you’ve tried the rest and you’re not completely satisfied masking the smell or not smoking in the house, you’re going to want to invest in a few things to improve ambient air quality. If you have lots of natural light, opt for a few house plants. House plants can naturally improve the air quality in your home, making it easier for weed smell to dissipate and disappear.

The key is keeping the air moving. Keep a window open when you smoke and run the ceiling fan. You can also use oscillating fans to help keep it moving. If you smoke a lot of weed in your home, you’ll want to bring out the big guns and invest in a carbon air filter. Carbon absorbs odors found in cannabis smoke and pushes out clean, purified air. It works wonders for dealing with a lot of smoke and scrubbing the air clean so that nothing in the house can absorb odors. Best of all, they seem to get cheaper and cheaper every year.

Vape or dab instead of smoking flower

Many smokers prefer to get high the old fashioned way, with weed and fire. That’s fine and well if the smell isn’t an issue, though it’s possible to achieve the same level of “high” using cleaner smoking methods, like vaping or switching to dabs. Many different vaporizers are available that can vaporize dried cannabis flowers, allowing you to get the full effects of smoking flower without the burning smell. Smoking concentrates like shatter, wax, live resin, or rosin (also known as dabs) can also promote the same, if not more potent, effects as dried cannabis flower without the smell.

Vaporization offers all the benefits of smoking actual weed while limiting the drawbacks, like odor and potential side effects. Vaporizers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are capable of vaporizing from actual flowers, while others vaporize concentrates like BHO. Some can do both, and others can do more. No matter which vaporizer you choose, vaporizers are convenient, discreet, flavorful, and flexible. They can provide the perfect flavors with low-temp decarboxylation that won’t damage any delicate terpenes from the flower, allowing you to enjoy the full spectrum of effects more efficiently than you could by using a torch or lighter. Best of all, vaporizers don’t produce smoke, which is the smelly factor most people are concerned with when it comes to smoking weed. They produce vapor, which is mostly odorless and dissipates in a room completely.

Dabbing concentrates can also offer all the benefits weed has to offer without the smell. Much like vapes, concentrate smoke dissipates and can’t be detected in a room after about 5 minutes. Low temp dabs that have intact terpenes (like SHO rosin or live resin) can even get you higher than flower alone since these forms of cannabis are highly concentrated. That being said, a little goes a long way. Save money, get higher, don’t stink: choose dabs.