How to Remove Pet Odor From Your Car
Many of us pet-lovers delight in seeing a fluffy dog head poking out of a car window when we’re out on the road. Perhaps it’s even your pet’s cute face greeting fellow drivers! Regardless, we love to carry our pets along with us wherever we go, but this can present some pretty stinky problems.
You see, pet odor can get particularly bad in your car. Increased heat and cramped quarters can quickly combine to turn mild odors into near unbearable ones! As you might have already put together, smell-creating bacteria thrive in hot environments, making your car the perfect habitat for nasty odors. And odors don’t necessarily have to result from pet urine or feces; sometimes, your pet’s dander or skin oils can cause musty smells to become embedded in your car’s upholstery or carpet.
So what is the solution? Remove the source of the odors: the smelly microbes themselves.
In this article, we’ll explore how to do just this! There are several different types of material in your car where pet odors might become embedded—either through messy accidents or simply daily dander.
While the pet odor issue in your car is likely coming from urine, feces, dander, or oils, it’s always a good idea to prepare the area for treatment by removing all residual pet hair or other refuse. The easiest and best way to do this is to vacuum your car. This can be done at home or at any public car wash which offers vacuum services. While removing hair and other residues from your car’s upholstery and carpet is not an essential step, it will ultimately make the cleaning process easier in the long run!
It can also be a good idea to clean your car on a clear day and out of direct sunlight if possible, opening the windows or doors to allow the vehicle to air out after the treatment period (more on this below).
Perhaps the easiest place for pet odors to get embedded is in your car’s fabric upholstery, but luckily, it’s fairly easy to remove. Your first task will be to locate the specific areas of upholstery where odors are especially noticeable. This could be a simple task if your dog loves to sit in a particular spot, but it can also be difficult if your pet likes to range around the vehicle. The obvious prevention for this is to limit your pet to a certain area of the car, making future treatments that much easier!
Once you’ve identified the areas where odors are particularly nasty, it’s time to treat! We recommend that you use one of Unique’s top-notch pet odor eliminating products. Our products contain safe, effective bacteria and enzymes that eat up and completely eliminate odors and stains at their source. No masking the real issue. No overpowering fragrances that are worse than the original smell. Just safe odor elimination Nature’s way!
For cleaning upholstery, we recommend that you use Pet Odor and Stain Eliminator—although our other products will also do an excellent job.
Simply follow these steps, using Pet Odor and Stain Eliminator, to remove odors:
Another likely place your pet may have either had an accident or otherwise left some smelly DNA is in your vehicle’s carpet. Luckily, Unique has you covered here as well!
Carpet Shampoo is Unique Clean Home’s quintessential odor eliminator for carpets of all types, and your car is no exception. Carpet Shampoo functions much like other Unique products, and of course it is completely safe. It can be used on your carpet floor mats to easily and effectively remove stains and odors. It also removes pet pheromones, which are essentially odors only your pet can smell. If the source of these odors isn’t removed, your pet may continue to resoil the same spot more than once.
If you have a carpet extractor, you can use Carpet Shampoo as a cleaning solution. A carpet extractor is an industrial carpet cleaning machine that forces water and a cleaning solution into the carpet and extracts it back out, leaving the carpet like new. (If you don’t have a carpet extractor, no problem! See below.)
To clean your car’s carpet using a carpet extractor machine, follow these steps:
If you don’t have access to a carpet extractor, you can still clean your car’s carpet! However, we do suggest that you use a slightly higher concentration of product. This is because you won’t have a machine forcing the product deep into the carpet fibers and therefore cleaning more thoroughly. You can compensate somewhat for this factor by using a mixture of Carpet Shampoo with a stronger concentration of bacteria.
To clean your car’s carpet WITHOUT a carpet extractor, follow these steps:
While most vehicles may have fabric upholstery, there are a growing number that bypass traditional fabric for the sleek look and feel of leather. But many people find themselves at a loss to know how to clean leather upholstery or other interior vehicle materials made of leather.
In reality, however, while you may need to take some extra precautions when cleaning leather, the process is quite simple and effective!
Important Note: while we are confident in our products, we do recommend that you test the procedures outlined below on an inconspicuous area of your vehicle’s leather material. Certain types of leather can react differently to products, so it’s a good idea to see how your particular material behaves before attempting to clean a more visible area.
First, like with other materials, you must identify the area most effected by a stain or odor. This can be more difficult with leather since odors or stains can be fainter and harder to detect. Again, odors will likely accumulate in your pet’s favorite spot, but it can also be a good idea to lightly treat a wider area of the leather material just to cover your bases.
Cleaning your car’s leather interior is simple:
Our pets form an integral part of our lives, and of course, we want to take them everywhere we go! But pets are also smelly sometimes, so it’s no surprise that odors can start to become an issue, especially when combined with the close quarters and, frequently, high temps inside our cars.
You are asleep in bed when you hear that gagging, coughing noise that causes you to jump out of bed to try to get your dog or cat outside to safely vomit away from your carpet. But, you are just not fast enough and now you have vomit on the carpet or worse yet the bed, couch or any other surface.
Finally, the world feels like it is opening back up. Now you have to go back to an office rather than work from home and getting your pets back into the routine has some challenges you may have to overcome.
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