We think it is safe to say that our pets become family and some people may even call them their furry loved ones. We have a few clients that even call them their furry children. No matter what the name may be, we can't help but love them. However there are times where we may not love what they do to our furniture, belongings, and carpet; especially when it comes to pet urine. It can be aggravating, smelly, and downright not very healthy for the living environment when our pets have those messes. Over the years, many store bought products have came up that claim to deal with urine odor and other bad odor issues. There are absorbent products, deodorizers, enzymes, and many other pet odor removal products out there, but do they really work? We've found that many of them claim that you can simply spray the product and the odor will go away, and there are a few type of pet odor removal products.
Types Of Pet Odor Removal Products
Masking Agents - As the name suggests, a masking agent simple masks the smell and doesn't really do anything but cover the smell up for a while. It has to be applied over and over again to keep up with the odor. This is bad for three reasons - the first reason is that it can be very expensive having to purchase more and more product. The second reason is that when you apply a solution to urine you change the chemical make up of the urine itself. We've found that these masking agents make it extremely difficult to remove the odor and staining when we're called to professionally remove it. The third reason is that many of these masking agents will leave a residue that can make that area get dirty faster which will cause premature wear to the carpet and lessen it's lifespan.
Pairing Agents - These type of odor removal products work on a molecular level where a malodor smelling molecule will bond with odor removal product to create an odorless molecule. To put it in simple terms, the pairing agent odor removal product cancels out the bad smell. We find that these products do work quite well but the one major issue is that when using pairing agents, the actual source of the odor isn't being removed from the carpet.
Enzyme Agents - Enzymes are good bacteria and their job is to search out bad bacteria such as the kind in urine that causes the odor. When the enzymes encounter the bad bacteria they begin to break it down and eat which destroys the malodor causing bacteria. Enzymes are an excellent choice when it comes to pet odor removal and is what we mainly utilize to attack pet urine odor.
How Do We Remove Pet Odor?
We offer two types of pet odor removal. The more cost effective of the two options is the topical odor removal, however; as you'll read below if your pet has used a specific area multiple times we'll need to use a more invasive approach to remove the source of the odor.
Topical Odor Removal
For our topical pet odor removal process we use a product that helps to break down the urine and urine salt crystals so that they can be more easily removed from the carpet. We apply the odor removal product topically and we allow it to dwell to give it plenty of time to work. We then take our sub surface extraction tool that allows us to remove the urine from the carpet padding, carpet backing, and the carpet face yarn. We'll treat the areas multiple times until we see that no more urine is coming out of the carpet. We then deal with any remaining staining with our specialty spotting products.
Restoration Odor Removal
This process is best for when our furry loved one has marked or urinated in one area over and over again. This issue then becomes that the urine has soaked through the carpet, the backing, and now is being absorbed into the sub floor. First we disengage the carpet and pull it back and we can easily identify the problem area from the back of the carpet. We remove the padding and then clean and treat the sub floor with a sealing product that doesn't allow the urine to penetrate back through leaving the urine contained. Once the sealing product dries we treat the carpet backing and face yarns like we do in our topical odor removal process. Next we'll replace the pad and re-install the carpet. Finally we'll clean the carpet and deal with any staining that remains.