It's a sticky August afternoon, the AC is losing ground, and the back bedroom smells like a kennel again. You scrubbed that spot back in March. It was fine for weeks. Then the humidity rolled in and the smell came right back with it.
When an odor behaves like that, the urine is under the carpet. What you cleaned was the top of the fibers, while the part doing the smelling soaked through the backing into the pad, and sometimes into the subfloor below. Humid air reactivates it. Plug-ins and sprays cover it for a day. A rental steam machine can make it worse by pushing more water down and spreading the spot wider.
Getting rid of it means treating it at the depth it reached. That's the whole idea behind our pet treatment.
Tracking down the spots you can't see
Most homes with a pet problem have more spots than the owner knows about. The obvious one by the door is usually joined by three or four older ones along a wall or behind a chair, places where a dog or cat went once and nobody noticed. Your technician uses detection tools to map them, including spots that look perfectly clean in daylight. Where it's needed, the tech checks how far down the contamination goes, so you know if you're dealing with surface spots or urine that's been in the pad for years.
You get a count and a price before any treatment starts.
The treatment itself
Each spot gets a live enzyme along with an oxidizer, applied heavily enough to follow the urine down. The enzymes break apart the organic material in urine, vomit and feces, which is what feeds the odor-causing bacteria. No perfume goes on to cover anything up. When the treatment has done its job, the carpet smells like nothing at all, which is how clean carpet should smell.
After the enzyme has time to work, the area is extracted and cleaned with the rest of the carpet. That pulls out the broken-down residue along with the stain. Very little water is involved, so you aren't trading a urine smell for a mildew smell a week later, and the room is usable again in a couple of hours at most.
The same approach handles other organic odors and stains. Musty smells from a damp corner, food spills, vomit, and grease or oil that got tracked in from the driveway are all part of the work. Smoke odor and paint spots get their own products, and the tech will tell you honestly how much improvement to expect.
Odds on an old stain
Odor is the part we can usually beat. Color is harder. Urine is acidic when it's fresh and turns alkaline as it ages, and over time it can bleach or yellow carpet dye for good. A treated spot will be clean and odor-free but may still show as a lighter patch. Your technician will point out which spots are likely to do that before you pay a dime.
Now and then the contamination is too far gone. If urine has soaked a section of pad for years, replacing that piece of pad, and sometimes treating the subfloor under it, is the real fix, and a cleaning company can only do so much. We'll tell you if that's where things stand. For a deeper read on how urine moves through carpet, pad and subfloor and what fixes each layer, our sister site has a guide on getting pet urine out at every level of the floor.
If an odor we treated comes back, call us. We'll come back and re-treat it at no charge, because the job isn't done until the room smells clean.
Our offers page has a $25 coupon for pet treatment. When you call 803-393-7625, it helps to know about how many spots you suspect and how long the problem has been going on. You can also book online and leave those details in the notes.