Pet odours can be tricky and challenging to deal with. Here you can find tips that will be useful whether you’re cleaning up an odour from a previous home owner or tenant, or cleaning up after your own.

There is a spectrum of severity of odours depending on the situation. Each requiring different levels of work to fully take care of the odour. Depending on how much area and how severe the pet has affected the house.

If you’re looking to seriously take care of your home for the foreseeable future, there are a few things you can try. These approaches will vary depending on how often you want to be maintaining good odour control, also on whether if you even know where the affected areas are.

First things first, if you’re living in the property and the pets are yours, clean up after your pets as soon as possible. This makes sure that urine and other waste will not be soaked up by the material very much, and makes it easier to clean up in the short term.

Store bought odour remover and/or pet stain cleaners should be effective in immediately removing any short term odours. Apply with warm water, and make sure to rinse afterwards to ensure your material doesn’t get damaged.

Every once in a while, ideally annually, you should deep clean your carpets. Most hardware stores should allow you to rent a carpet cleaner machine. Alternatively you could use professional cleaning services to do this for you, this will usually be the best course of action.

If you’re a property manager or a landlord who had a previous owner/tenant, There are going to be circumstances that prevent you from knowing exactly when and where any soiling has happened. you’ll have to find where animals have affected the property. You can do this with using an UVA (Ultra Violet A) lights, finding soiled areas should be simple with this. You can also use moisture testing meters. Even if the area hasn’t been recently soiled the meters can pick up residues in the area that act as conductors. Even with just regular bright lights, you should be able to look closely and find any staining or discoloration of areas on your property.

Depending how much the area is affected, it might be better to simply replace the soiled material, especially if it’s carpet or something similar. As trying to clean out every layer of carpet is difficult and not guaranteed to be effective. If after you’ve replaced the carpet the odour remains, you may have to the under material as well. Depending on what kind of material it is, whether it’s concrete or wood, you should deal with decontamination differently.

You can spray down the materials with pet cleaner. With wood, you should also be prepared to sand down any heavily affected areas before applying the pet cleaner. After this is done, find a primer type product to seal the odours into the material.