[David Rogers]

I must say, I've always tended to pay lip service to deodourization. The odd drop of Super Lemon Concentrate where a carpet was smelly but not had to think about it much beyond that.

However I done a quote this afternoon (and got the booking for tomorrow at 11am) for a lovely property. Went in to look at the carpet and it looked absolutely immaculate (under 2 yrs old), when I asked the lady about her expectations and what she was looking for she said "oh I know it looks fine, I'm not expecting it to look any better after the clean, I just want you to get rid of that awful smell".   Sure enough there was a strong odour in the room; they have lots of dogs, chickens and 3 young kids who have apparantly all pueked on the carpet a lot in the last year. The odour smelled a bit like a cross between dog urine and hay / a farmyard!   It wasn't quite as unpleasant as that sounds but it was very distinct.

So the main objective is deodourization.  All I have to hand is the aforementioned 'Super Lemon Concentrate' but will this be enough for the job?

I am going to pre-spray the clean with 'Enz-All' due to the fact that most of the dirt / odour is of organic origin.   but will something like 'Enz-All' help with the odour?

The carpet is a good quality, light brown, deep, cut-pile 80/20.

I'm planning on using HWE, mainly because I want to use the 'Enz-All' and it has to be HWE extracted.

Any views or suggestions on attacking the odour problem?

[Mike Halliday]

4 ways to deal with odours..... 1)mask it......2) remove it,  3)neutralise it, or 4)pair it.

your super lemon concentrate will do the first, just mask the smell ( but it is still there and usually returns)

enzall will neutralise it then any remaining smell will be removed by the HWE.  so with what you have got then this is your best option

[derek west]

come on mike.

pair it?

[Mike Halliday]

were you add another smell which either cancels out the original smell or alters it so it is not so unpleasant

are you saying you have'nt done the IICRC odour control course

[derek west]

wanted to but theyve cancelled it due to lack of attendance. good tip, if anyone attends an iicrc course, turn up 20 mins late, you won't miss anything, just the iicrc video, so boreing.

[David Rogers]

Thanks Mike, good call.

[Steve. Taylor]

You forgot number 5 mike BURN IT

[David Rogers]

Ok, so here's the debrief, if anyones interested 

This was a fab job today, thoroughly enjoyed it, with the possible exception that I estimated it at 2 hours and it took 3 so my hourly rate was a bit down.

I may have given the impression in my first post that this was a minging house - not at all, a beautiful converted barn, out in the sticks. It was simply that they are 'farmy' people, chickens and dogs roaming arounds etc and they have 3 young children, tramping poo and stuff into the house.  The lounge (which I was working on today) was HUGE..... I'd say about 40' x 24'.

Firstly, I inspected the carpet and realized that my 'pre-spotting' phase was going to be big on this job; the carpet was generally nice but there were around 8 nasty black, greasy spots.   Each of them stunk of chicken wee with a hint of poo.    I tried a couple of appropriate spot treatments and eventually found that good old Chemspec Spot Remover was doing the best job of softening each spot and turning it into a nice removable mush.  Got about 75% of each spot off with the spatula but the remaining 25% took patience, fresh water and repeated blotting with terry towell. Eventually nothing going onto the terry any more and the spots were gone.   Great job!   I next treat the areas where the spots had been with some Urine Neutralizer (again Chemspec as it's what I had in the van).  I've heard that the more this product smells on application, the more work it's doing; eg.... you've hit the spot and it's neutralizing the urine odour source. On this occasion it STUNK so must have been working hard.

Next I cooked up some nice warm prespray of Enz-All and preprayed the carpet. Didn't over do it but used a bit more on the areas where the chick poo had been. Gave it 5 mins dwell on it's own, then used the GEN4 to agitate it. The more I use that machine the more I value it (not just for dry compound). At this point after the agitation with the GEN4 the carpet looked good enough to walk away from!   But of course the Enz-All has to be extracted. Used my new back up machine; Craftex Maxi; 135psi, 1500w 2 stage, in-line heater option fitted.  Ok, so it's no truckmount and in fact it's no Ninja but this little £1500 machine has never failed to give me awesome results.  The in-line heater in this is far better than most. I used Prochem Extractor Plus and gave the carpet a good rinse to get the enz-all out, and because of this; tonnes of dry strokes.

After a quick groom with the brush I got the Turbo Dryers on the carpet and job done. An awesome looking job if I do say so myself!  I am confident that I have neutralized the source of the pong. So why did it take so long; well the customer is a friend of a friend of a friend and when I was quoting yesterday had shown me a 3" diameter old paint stain in the study, but had then said, "no don't worry about that, I don't think that's ever going to come out".   I decided to go the extra mile as we all have to on these types of jobs so I spent quite a bit of time getting the paint stain out; worked it nice and when I'd finished you'd never know it had been there.   I left before the customer came home but 3 hours later I got an excited call on the mobile from the customer; she was over the moon with the job, but mostly, she could not believe the result I'd got with the paint spot in the study.  She's asked me to send her 20 business cards and has promised to get me some reco's.   Moral of the story, going that extra mile might sometimes not be related to the job itself but if you can find a way to delight, it will usually pay dividends.

Happy days.   

David