How to remove pet urine and its smell from carpet

Getting the patch clean is easy. Getting the smell out so your pet stops returning to the spot takes enzymes and patience. Both below.

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With pet accidents the stain is the small problem. Urine soaks through the pile into the backing, and what stays down there advertises the spot to your pet long after the surface looks and smells fine to you. Ordinary carpet cleaners cannot reach that; they perfume it. Enzyme cleaners actually digest the compounds, which is why the method below is mostly about getting liquid out of the backing and then letting biology take its time.

Takes 30 minutes of work across a day or two.

What you need

Kitchen roll, a lot of it
Cold water
An enzyme (bio) cleaner made for pet accidents
Bicarbonate of soda

The steps

Blot fresh accidents hard. Stand on a thick pad of kitchen roll over the spot. Your weight pulls urine up from the backing, which is where the smell lives. Keep going with fresh pads until they come up nearly dry.
Cool water flush, then blot again. A little cold water over the area, then more standing on pads. Never warm water: heat bonds the proteins to the fibre and bakes the smell in.
Let an enzyme cleaner do the real work. Apply a pet-specific enzyme cleaner generously, following its label, and leave it the full time it asks for, usually hours. Enzymes digest the urine compounds; ordinary cleaners only mask them, and your pet can still smell what you cannot.
Bicarb overnight for the last of the odour. Once the area has dried after the enzyme treatment, dust it with bicarbonate of soda, leave overnight, and hoover it off.

What never to do

Ammonia-based cleaners: to a pet the spot now smells marked, and they return to it
Heat, steam or a hairdryer before the enzymes have worked
Masking sprays instead of treatment
Mixing any cleaning products together

And the rule that outranks every stain: never mix cleaning products. Bleach combined with ammonia, or with vinegar or other acids, releases toxic gas. One product at a time, rinsing between.

Repeat accidents in one spot, or a smell that survives the enzyme treatment, usually mean the underlay has taken it. That needs extraction from below the pile, and it is a standard part of a professional carpet clean.

When the stain wins

Hot-water extraction rinses the pile and the backing rather than scrubbing the surface, which is why it beats home methods on set-in stains. Carpet cleaning from £36 for a bedroom, with the same crews that handle 300+ letting agents’ check-outs.

See carpet cleaning All stain guides