Maybe you’ve already heard of the new trend: using blacklights to find pet urine and other bodily fluids causing odors around the home. The question is, is it worth it?
The reality is that odors can be hard to find in the home. Treating urine stains can seem hard enough, but if you can’t even find where urine is, you can’t treat the area and remove the odor! Yes, you could try to use your nose, but let’s be honest: that’s a little ridiculous when a blacklight can pick it up instantly!
That’s why blacklights are becoming a go-to solution for pet parents around the country.
Blacklights work by picking up and illuminating items that fluoresce. These items contain exposed phosphorus atoms that reflect short wavelength UV light back to our eyes. For instance, paper shines under a blacklight because of the fluorescent chemicals added as a whitener. In the same way, many bodily fluids will fluoresce and show up under a blacklight, including pet urine!
Because blacklights work well at illuminating urine accidents, pet parents have started to use them instead of their noses.
In our opinion and the opinion of many pet lovers, blacklights are an excellent way to find those tricky urine stains.
However, keep in mind that urine will not, as many believe, show up bright white under a blacklight. Instead, it will be a bright yellow. Some people find it easier to spot urine with a blacklight at night.
At nighttime, with the lights off in your home, you can find urine by sweeping any suspected area with your blacklight. It’s best to hold the blacklight about 1-3 inches away from the carpet or other surface you’re examining. Look for that bright yellow color!
Once you’ve found the urine stain, you can treat it with your favorite stain and odor removing product. Of course, we recommend Pet Odor and Stain Eliminator or one of our other products. To learn more about why our products work so well at removing urine stains and odors as well as how the actual process works, please check out our article, How to Remove Pet Odor.
Our products (and other bacteria-based products) use bacteria to digest stains and/or odors. Bacteria naturally produce proteins or are partially composed of proteins.
There is some talk around the interwebs about bacterial proteins being dangerous. The reality is, while some proteins, like botulinum toxin, are dangerous, the vast majority of proteins are not. ALL enzymes, for instance, are proteins. Like we said above, bacteria naturally produce proteins, and bacteria themselves are partially composed of proteins! Bacteria can also leave harmless remnants of proteins behind.
In effect, just because you’re dealing with a protein produced or contained within a bacterium doesn’t mean it’s toxic. With our products specifically, these kinds of protein producing bacteria are avoided completely. We’ve discovered that these traces of proteins contain phosphorus atoms, making the proteins fluoresce under a blacklight.
What this means is that, after cleaning with our products, you will likely see a very faint and dull glow under a blacklight. This is just the harmless proteins left behind by the bacteria. They won’t be bright yellow like the urine. Instead, they will show up as a dull and pale yellow that will probably be very difficult to see.
If you use our Unique Pet Care products, even though your floor or surface is clean and no odor is present, there will still be things that show up under a black light. This is just the proteins naturally present in the bacteria we use.
The bottom line is that you don’t have to keep treating with Pet Odor and Stain Eliminator or one of our other products if the stain is gone and the odor removed. You will likely still see these proteins present in products under a blacklight, even when the area is clean.
Blacklights have become quite the urine-and-pet-defecation finding devices in recent years. Pet parents, not wanting to spend extra time searching for odors with their noses, find that blacklights are often the answer they need.
After you’ve found the urine stain in question, however, you still need to remove it, which is why we at Unique Pet Care have created most powerful products available to tackle these stains and odors at their source.
We hope this article has helped you discover more about how blacklights work and how to find urine stains and odors using them. If you have any questions, please let us know by contacting us at support@uniquemm.com!
Proteins that fluoresce:
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