[mark_roberts]

Whats your favourite process and chemicals from experience when removing dog pee odour from 100% wool rugs.

Ive 5 of them to do next week and need a first time result.

thanks
Mark

[*paul_moss]

Mark clean with Chemical deodoriser such as Prochem urine neut. Let fully dry then apply a bactrial deodoriser such as clensan to remove any other odour left.Let dry at least for 24 hrs. Re apply if nec.
If you have any staining, then dependant on wool type and colour use the nec reducer/oxidiser.

[darren_metcalfe]

I have just used Chempspec Kill Odour Plus, Traffic lane and Deodoriser.  Well impressed.

http://www.chemspecworld.com/catalog_browse.asp?ictNbr=217

[brights cleaning]

i would ues Solubac Fron Solutions
works really well for me

[Alan_Harrison]

Hi Mark.
It seems that this time of the year we get lots of dog pee rugs. I'm sure you know enough to handle these jobs well enough. One particular kind of rug come to mind that can give problems.  Pakistan Bokhara rugs can sometimes react rather strangely. I always warn customers that this type of rug will either come out perfect or end up a write-off. So far we have have three go wrong. One I have in the workshop now and it's awful. When we got the rug it stank and was soaked down one side were the customer had washed the rug. I've treated the rug to all of our usual treatments and in the end the soiled half of the rug will not dry out. The back of the rug remains stiff and contaminated and the pile is sticky and slimy to the touch. The bacterial deodouriser was compltely ineffective even in the heat of the drying room so I've failed on all accounts with this one. These blighters take up so much time and I hate to tell the customer I've been beaten.
Best of luck
PS
I now charge £3 sq ft for contaminated rugs and I've never had anyone turn me down. I recon it's good value for the effort I put in.

Al

[*paul_moss]

Alan are you imersion cleaning the bad ones?

[Alan_Harrison]

Not really. I have been tempted to turn the hose on a few mingers though.

I'd be very cautious  ( don't do it ) with Total Immersion of hand woven rugs. TI is popular in the USA but there are vast numbers of machine made rugs over there. A great many of them man made fibre. A cleaning plant can turn round 50 rugs a day with just 2 or 3 operators.

I could list the possible complications of TI cleaning but I want to spend some of my life not looking at this PC screen.

Extraction cleaning is still the preferred method for cleaning quality hand made rugs even in the US because it gives total control over all elements of the process.

Back to my favorite subject of dog pee........

I find it best to make sure all smelly patches on the rug are completely dry before I apply deodorisers.
I can then Badger the rug before I do anything. As stated on the board many times, removing the dry soil is vital.

To activate the bio deodoriser I have an 8 x 4 sheet of ply that has an underfloor heating element fitted to it. It has polyflor on top which gets a bit soft as it warms up so I'm going to try to get a sheet of stainless steel. I put polythene over the top and leave it at 26 degrees for about 12 hours.  Usually it works very well and nothings caught fire yet!

[Liahona]

Alan, if you dont do an immersion clean you will not under normal circumstances get rid of any odour problem let alone a dog pee one.  Whatever chemical you may throw at it.

In the states no where is extraction cleaning a preffered method to clean good bad or indifferent quality hand woven rugs.  I was cleaning, well the plant was, an average of 100 area rugs a day, 6 days a week.  Most of these were hand woven.  Having said that it doesnt make much difference how it is made, machine or hand it still needs a saturation clean to remove an odour.

I would be happy to get rid of any odour you may have in a textile.

I have a question for you on the badger.  Am I right, you use it on a carpet that has a dog pee stain on it that you have then put a deodouriser on top of?  If so do you then clean the badger before it goes on another textile.  That must take ages to do apart from being a pain in the bum.  Wouldnt a saturation clean be so much easier apart from being more affective?  Best, Dave.

[mark_roberts]

Ive done a total imersion clean twice and both times it worked but its a lot of hassle to setup etc.

Thats why Im after an easier option.

Cleaned two of them today.  Dusted then treated heavily on both side with Chemspecs kill odour citrus.  Let dwell for 30mins and then a thorough TM HWE clean followed by a handtool rinse with heavy extraction of the stained areas both front and back.  Then a heavy treatment of Solubac both sides.

Theres three more but two are real bleeders so will pass on them until I get the ok to clean them.

Currently drying.

[Alan_Harrison]

Hi Dave

Hmmm. 100 rugs per day. say the average size is 8ft x 5ft at £2-50 sq ft.... that works out at err. £10000 per day. Less than 40 minutes spent on each rug. I always suspected I was doing something wrong. If we do three 12 x 9 rugs in a day I'm more than pleased.

You are quite correct to say that bio deodorisers require prolonged saturation. However I find that without a little heat then they are not very effective for me.

The Badger is for removing dry soil. If there are patches of wet dog pee then the soil is a goo that sticks to the pile and can't be removed by beating. If I dry the rug out, then Badger the dry soil away, then that's 3mm of pee soaked mud at the base of the pile that's removed before I consider what else is needed to finish the rug. The Badger beats the rug from the back. The dirt falls through a mesh grid which at the end of the day is rolled away and the floor washed down. The Badger is not contaminated in any way.

When I contribute to a posting I try to keep in mind the context of the situation. The majority of the readers of these posts don't have the benefit of owning or having the use of a vast range of top end equipment, cleaning workshop, drying room or custom built washing plant. They do the best they can with what they have got. That takes me back to the two main points of my post. (A) Get rid of as much dry soil as you can before you clean/deodorize. (B) Total Immersion.  Don't do it unless you have a centrifuge dryer, flatbed dryer, Rug stretching facilities and a rug repairer on hand.

Dave I think I might send you this little stinker. I forgot to mention that the back of the rug is sprayed with a tacky nonsetting adhesive that's supposed to stop the rug from creeping. Sometimes I long for a nice easy lounge carpet to clean.. I wouldn't know were to start!!

[Liahona]

Alan, if you need me to do it then drop me an e-mail or give me a bell and we can sort it out.  The glue on the back is a real pain as it stinks untill dry otherwise shouldnt be a problem.

With regards your £2:50 a square foot price.  Never in a month of Sundays in the states will a rug plant get that amount for a normal clean.  I am not on about anything special.  I charged other cleaners 50 cents a square foot to clean rugs and to a walk in client I charged a dollar a square foot.  If lucky most cleaners would then charge their client about 3 dollars a foot so they were happy and so was I.

You cant really compare state prices against U.K prices for obvious reasons.

I averaged 10,000 a day but it was dollars not pounds.

Centifuge drying where the water is forced out is ok with a clean water clean but arent always so good on a foul odour clean.  With a foul odour clean you have to replace the solied water with clean water which a centrifuge doesnt do.

Anyway, best, Dave....... and again I am quite happy to do the foul odour rugs for you.