How to Get Rid of Dog Pee Smell from the Carpet

Dogs are man’s best friends – except maybe when they pee on our carpet!  While we still love them, we don’t love the smell and the stains that go with their accidents.  Rather than live with them (the spots – not the dog) here’s what you can do to prevent Spot’s spots.

  1. You want to treat the spot as quickly as you can – over time the chemicals in urine will react with the carpet fibers and make it more difficult to clean. Fast action will also prevent the urine from penetrating into the pad.
  2. Blot the stain repeatedly with a clean white cloth or paper towel. Repeat with dry ones as often as needed in order to get as much urine out as possible before moving on. DO NOT use newspaper or colored clothes. You run the risk of further staining your carpet with the inks and dyes in them. We have had customers ruin their carpet using a colored towel and transferring its color to the carpet.
  3. If you have a wet/dry shop vac or a portable carpet cleaner, vacuum up as much of the wetness as possible. Your goal here is to remove as much of the urine as possible before going on to further steps.
  4. Blot the spot with cloths and clear cool water several times, alternate with either dry cloths, your shop vac or your portable carpet cleaner to extract the now diluted pee from the carpet. Blot the carpet, do not rub.  Aggressive rubbing can distort the carpet fibers and ruin the carpet
  5. After repeating several times, place new clean dry cloths down, add some weight (good heavy books work well) and leave overnight so that the remaining liquid is soaked up.
  6. Depending on the dog’s diet and medication, the pee can leave a spot. If, the next day there is a spot, mix 1-part white vinegar with 3 parts water and blot the spot with a white cloth or paper towel, repeating step #4 above using the diluted vinegar solution. Then repeat one last time using clear water.
  7. If the urine spot is in a corner of the room, you may be able to disengage the carpet from the tackless strips and treat the backside of the carpet and padding directly. Be careful – the tackles strips are sharp.
  8. You can treat odor with pet cleaners that contain special enzymes that break down the chemicals responsible for the smells. You can find them in most grocery and hardware stores in convenient spray bottles. Follow the directions on the bottle. The enzyme MUST come directly into contact with your dog’s pee in order to be effective. Often that is difficult to achieve if the urine has soaked into the carpet’s pad. In that case it’s time to call the professionals at Apke who have special tools – included syringes that can inject these odor killing enzymes right into the pad, so they don’t have to soak through the carpet to be effective.