How Come Carpet Pet Pee Stains are So Hard to Remove?

Pet urine is a mixture of water, enzymes, urea, uric acid, cholesterol and other trace elements – along with a yellow pigment. Urine from a dog or cat starts out as an acid but becomes alkaline after 12 hours with bacteria. The salt from the alkaline reacts with the yellow pigment and this results in yellow coloring or stains that can sometimes be seen on floors.

What you should do as soon as possible with cat or dog urine spots is get the pee up!

The longer urine sits on a rug or carpet, the more difficult removal becomes. The ammonia that develops in animal urine can result in color changes, particularly if there are blue or cool tones in the flooring. This is important to know because it may sometimes seem that a carpet cleaner cannot clean an “old” “stain”, even though the carpet is really clean – because the “stain” is actually a color change that has occurred within the carpet or rug fibers.

One other thing with animal urine spots is the odor they leave behind. This horrible odor is caused by the ammonia and bacteria above, and if not killed properly it will increase when moisture is around. This is why a home or floor with pets smells worse on a humid Minnesota day, or when wet. Urine also penetrates deep down into carpet backing, or the pad and is difficult to remove by hand.

Bacteria must be eliminated to properly clean a carpet or floor with dog or cat urine on it.

Many of the carpet cleaning products you find in stores are stain focused, so they only address the color left behind when an animal makes pee. This is a clean looking home, but not a clean smelling one. An enzymatic cleaner or disinfectant, such as the one ThoroClean uses when cleaning must be used to accomplish removal of the spot and the smell. A professional carpet cleaner using high quality steam trucks and equipment combined with an enzymatic cleaner penetrates deeper into carpet and eliminates the bacteria lurking below.

Are you dealing with dog or cat stains? Call ThoroClean today at 505-883-0437.