read more | digg story

Removing skunk odor

Skunks can spray your dog or cat from up to 10 feet away and leave them reeking for weeks!

Removing skunk spray odor from a dog is normally a labor intensive task requiring bathing, tomato juice, and/or a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and detergent. The bathing part is pretty normal, but the tomato juice is hard to get out of their fur and hydrogen peroxide and harsh detergents will bleach a dog or cat’s coat and burn their eyes, ears and sensitive mucus membranes.

To remove that awful smell quickly and safely, simply mix 1 ounce of OdorXit Concentrate with one quart (500cc) of warm water. Bathe your pet as you would normally using a vet approved mild detergent shampoo and then rinse your pet with lukewarm warm water.

Next apply the OdorXit solution to your pet’s fur with a sponge or a wash cloth dipped in the OdorXit Concentrate solution and leave it on your pet for about 25 minutes.

Using a downward motion, start at the pet’s forehead and move downward over the eyes when applying solution to your pet’s face to avoid getting product in your pet’s eyes. Do not place product directly into pet’s inner ear either. After waiting approximately 25 minutes, rinse your with lukewarm water. Towel your pet dry as best you can and allow them to finish drying naturally. Once dry, your pet should smell wonderfully once again!

Removing Skunk Smell from Automobile (Inside and Out)

If you’ve recently been unfortunate enough to run over a skunk or a skunk has found its way into your garage, you probably need to treat both the inside and the outside of your vehicle to get rid of the stench.

Start by treating the wheels and undercarriage of the vehicle. If you’re lucky, stopping the smell there will also knock out any skunk smell inside the vehicle without you having to treat the carpeting and upholstery.

To treat the outside of the car, spray the undercarriage of the vehicle with a yard or deck sprayer containing 4 ounces of OdorXit Concentrate
mixed with 1 gallon of water. Be sure to cover the entire undercarriage, wheels and lower paint. In order to do this effectively, you’ll probably have to lie on the ground and spray the car from underneath it. Allow
the mixture to air dry and you’re finished. Viola! No more skunk smell
here! Running a car or truck through an automatic car wash will make the odor elimination a bit easier. Tractors and Motor Cycles are much easier because they give you easy access to the underbody (save the full faring race bikes).

To treat the interior of your vehicle, simply mix 1 ounce of OdorXit Concentrate with 20 ounces of water in a small handheld spray bottle.
Spray the vehicle’s carpeting and upholstery evenly and allow to air dry slowly. This may need to be repeated depending on how intensely the skunk odor permeated the vehicle.

Removing Skunk Odor from Carpet

Skunk odor on carpeting may be very smelly but it is almost always a superficial or surface contamination of the carpet (unless the skunk actually sprayed the carpet). Odors carried in on shoes and pet paws are easily removed by spraying only the contaminated spots on the floor.

Mix 1 ounce of OdorXit Concentrate with 20 ounces of water in a spray bottle. Give each spot on the carpet a couple of good spays and allow it to air dry. It is not necessary to saturate the rug because the contamination is just on the surface of the carpet.

Flooding the area may cause the odor producing material to be carried deeper into the carpet fibers and saturate the carpet padding.

Carpet that has been sprayed directly by a skunk may not be recoverable
due to the construction of carpet, especially if it has had time to soak
in.

Machine Washable Fabric and Clothing

If you were unlucky enough to have been sprayed by a skunk or just had your recently sprayed dog rub against you, OdorXit Concentrate will work on your clothes as well as your skin.

Removing skunk odor from machine washable fabric requires adding 3 or 4 caps full of OdorXit® Concentrate to the washing machine at the beginning of the wash cycle with the normal amount of laundry detergent. Allow the wash cycle to complete but delay the first spin cycle for 30 to 60 minutes (Most top loading washers will run to the end of the first wash cycle with the lid open and then stop before the spin cycle starts). Front load washers and the new “ultra safe” top load machines are a bit more difficult; consult your user’s manual for the proper procedure. After the wash/soak time, close the lid or restart the machine and let the machine finish its normal cycles. In some cases, it may be necessary to run the final rinse twice.

Leather

If you were wearing leathers when you hit the skunk on your motorcycle, leave the bike for later and start right away on your leathers. At the very first opportunity after the encounter, hose your self off, rinse in creek water, or any fresh water you can find. The more of the skunk spray you can remove before it dries the less you will have to neutralize later.

After rinsing yourself off, do the bike. Again, the more you can rinse off, the less you have to neutralize later.

When you get to your OdorXit, spray everything down with a mixture of 1 ounce OdorXit and 30 ounces of water. The odor will disappear!

Dry Clean Only Fabric and Clothing

Delicate dresses, blouses, shirts and wool suits should have the contaminated areas sprayed with OdorXit® Concentrate diluted 1 ounce concentrate with 30 ounces of water. Allow the OdorXit® to dry over night. If the odor returns re-treat with the OdorXit® Concentrate. When the odor is completely eliminated dry clean and press. The odor will not return.

Furniture with Fabric Upholstery

Skunk odor on furniture upholstery can be a bit more difficult because much of the fabric used on furniture is not colorfast. However, with skunk smell on the furniture colorfastness is a secondary consideration to the smell. Before you attempt a furniture recovery project, test OdorXit® on the back of the piece to see what happens. A nice piece of furniture with water marks and no smell is not acceptable either.

Since the skunk odor on furniture is usually a result of a dog that was sprayed jumping up on the furniture before he was deodorized, there is really very little material on the furniture, and washing it will do very little to improve the odor situation. Just spray the contaminated area with OdorXit® (Mix 1 ounce of OdorXit® with 20 to 30 ounces of water) and allow it to dry slowly.

Multiple applications may be necessary to remove all the odor, but it will work.

Skunk Odor Around The House

If you have had a skunk spray in your garage, under a porch or steps or even in the crawl space, OdorXit Concentrate can remove the odor there too. Small or closed areas can be treated with a deck or yard sprayer. If you’re trying to treat an area that is difficult to get to like under stairs or in a crawl space, use a hose end sprayer so that you don’t have to try and crawl into the confined space.

A hose end sprayer (pictured above) is a special plastic nozzle that has a dispensing jar screwed on the bottom. The sprayer mixes the contents of the bottle with the water being sprayed out the nozzle. Some of the sprayers have a variable mixture rates while others (cheaper) do not. Either way works OK for OdorXit applications involving skunk odor. Put about 4 ounces of OdorXit Concentrate in the bottle and fill it half way with water. Spray it on the area where the odor is coming from until the dispenser bottle is empty. The odor will be gone in an hour or so.

Some times when a large amount (relatively speaking) is applied to a small area the OdorXit Odor is rather slow in leaving. The component of OdorXit that produces this smell is the one that neutralizes ammonia and if there is no ammonia to neutralize, it lingers for a while. It can be neutralized almost immediately by misting a 4 part water, 1 part ammonia solution on the area where the OdorXit was applied. Spray only enough ammonia to neutralize the OdorXit (which is normally very little)

Interesting Skunk Facts

Skunk odor, which is not urine or a urine byproduct, is similar to the smell that is produced by de-composing urine (butyl seleno-mercaptan). It is stored in the skunk’s anal scent glands and can be accurately aimed and sprayed up to 10 feet away. Skunks use the powerful smell as an active defense system to drive off aggressors. The only thing this defense doesn’t work on is cars, trucks, motorcycles and the occasional farm tractor. But even spraying a motor vehicle has its effect, even if it is only on the passengers in the vehicle.

For more information about skunks than any one ought to want to know, here are some links that might interest you. Site 1 Site 2

Ok, what are you talking about?

What I am talking about is; the expectation that spraying a little OdorXit will fix a milk spill that has been spread around the car by several attempts to re-mediate or remove the problem. The OdorXit effort may be less than 100% successful because the odor is coming from areas that are not where you expect them to be coming from.

When the spill is on a seat, especially fabric, the more you wet the area the deeper the milk residue penetrates into the cushion.

This is not to say that the odor is not going to respond, it simply means that the easy cleaning and treating methods are not likely to work the first time.

The easy way to solve the milk spill is to take immediate action to remove the bulk of the milk before it spoils. This should include finding the nearest self-service car wash and vacuum out as much of the milk with the industrial vacuum cleaners as you can. After the initial cleaning, add enough water to wet the area and re-vacuum to remove the added water and the dissolved milk. Repeating this step several times will allow you to remove almost all of the milk before it begins to spoil and smell bad.

If you have OdorXit on hand, mix up a quart, 1 ounce of OdorXit and 30 ounces of water and pour it on the wet carpet or seat. Allow it to dry overnight and the odor will never develop.

If you do not have OdorXit on hand, get some! Mix up a quart of 1part OdorXit, 30 parts water and wet the affected area. It may take more than one application to remove the entire odor, especially from cushions because it has spoiled and turned into a cheese like material but fear not, the odor can and will be removed.

Yellow and brown pet stains including urine, feces and vomit stains on carpeting are easy to remove even after they have dried with the procedure I am about to tell you about. In fact, it is so easy you are likely to not believe it unless you actually try it.

Yes, its actually true, pet stains can be removed completely with just water if they have not been set into the carpet with home remedies that are ineffective and often dangerous.

The only thing you need to remove the stain is a glass of water and a water tolerant vacuum cleaner. If you don’t happen to own a Rainbow vacuum (at $1600) it’s OK because you can substitute nearly any large or small wet/dry shop vacuum cleaner. And actually the smaller ones are easier to use and often work better, and cost less than the big ones. Now, I am not talking about one of those little battery operated hand held ones, I’m taking about the real thing. Currently Sears has a powerful 4 gallon unit with the preferred smaller diameter hose for about $60 and Target has a 3 gallon one for about $40. If you are one of the luckier ones and already have a shop vac, make sure you clean the end of the hose before using it.

Here is the procedure:

• Pour enough water on the stain to wet it thoroughly
• Using only the end of the hose, vacuum the water out after 5 to 10 seconds by dragging the open end of the vacuum hose across the wet area until it is almost dry.
• If the stain is not completely removed on the first try repeat the process one more time.
• If the area smells, spray the area while it is still damp with OdorXit Concentrate diluted 1 part concentrate and 30 parts water and rub it in.
• If the stain is from a fresh urine deposit, and just a surface (stayed in the carpet) stain, the OdorXit Concentrate will remove all the odor. If the area has been contaminated with urine several times the OdorXit Concentrate will remove most of the odor, the rest can be controlled with OdorXit Magic.
• Vomit and feces stains are much easier to remove and the OdorXIt Concentrate will completely remove the odor.

OdorXit Concentrate chemically alters the odor causing residue, so that the urine residue no longer produces the odors. The catch is that OdorXit Concentrate diluted with water must come in direct contact with all the urine residue to eliminate all of the odor. A few carpet types and all carpet padding resist this effort. Odors caused by dog and even cat urine residue in hardwood flooring, sub-flooring, concrete, dirt, gravel, fabric, clothing, upholstery, and most other surfaces and material are very effectively and permanently eliminated.

If there is no budget for new carpet or even replacing just the padding, or the source of the odor is still adding to the problem, OdorXit Magic is the best choice.

OdorXit Magic uses an easy to use spray on “gas absorption” technology to attract, trap and eliminate urine odors from carpet, padding and flooring. When sprayed on flooring, carpeting, upholstery, and most other surfaces and materials, OdorXit Magic absorbs the gasses (odors) coming from the residue. This process continues for 2 to 12 weeks depending on the amount of odor being absorbed and the amount of sun shining on the area. When the odor starts coming back, reapply OdorXit Magic only to the area where the odor is coming from.

Just a note, permanently removing urine odors from contaminated carpet padding is even beyond the ability of OdorXit Concentrate. Some types of carpets present a significant challenge as well. Many berbers and some contractor grade carpets use construction techniques and materials that simply do not respond to OdorXit Concentrate. However all is not lost. Consider OdorXit Magic because it absorbs the gas produce by the urine in the padding.