Cleaning cat urine and getting rid of all the lingering odor can be a tough job, as just about any cat care-taker can tell you. Part of the reason it seems so difficult is that cat urine really is more tenacious than dog or human urine.
What works to remove your dog’s or your child’s “little accident” won’t work on kitty’s pool of piddle. With the right tools, though, getting rid of cat urine odor and stains can be remarkably easy and fast. Sorry, though, aliens aren’t going to do it for you.
Finding the Cat Urine
Sure, it’s easy enough to find the general area of the stain–your eyes and nose are a good enough detectors for that. The problem is that while you may find most of the urine, you’re unlikely to find it all. Cats tend to scatter urine onto walls and furniture when the scratch around to “bury” their leavings. These little droplets may not leave a strong odor or visible smell, but they can attract your cat back to the same area to strike again. So unless you want to be cleaning that area repeatedly, you’ll need to eliminate all traces of urine.
Fortunately, there’s a very easy way to find all the cat urine in a particular area. Just turn the lights off and shine a black light (UV light) on the area where you want to find the cat urine. The cat pee will glow a dull yellow or white. Be forewarned, though, that this method also turns up any remnants of other organic stains, such as blood, vomit or other animal or human urine. You may not like what you find. 🙂
Eliminating the Cat Urine
Once you’ve identified all the stained areas, you’ll need an effective cleaner that eliminates all the odor and hopefully does so the first time around. Both homemade cleaners and store-bought cleaners can be equally effective. With the homemade cleaner, of course, you’ll need to collect the ingredients and proper containers and mix up the cleaner yourself. This isn’t difficult and will probably save you some money, but if you’re in a hurry, you may prefer to buy store-bought cleaner.
If you’ve already tried a few basic carpet cleaners or pet urine removers and they haven’t worked, don’t give up! There are products that work well. General cleaners and cleaners designed for dog urine won’t do it, though. What you want is a cleaner that mentions removing cat urine specifically, such as Dumb Cat Anti-Marking & Cat Spray by Life’s Great Products.
Not all of these products work the same way, so carefully read the instructions and follow them as precisely as possible. If you just dump the cleaner on the stain and scrub, you may be wasting your time. For instance, with enzymatic cleaners, you’ll need to make sure there’s no soap or detergent residue, such as carpet cleaner, on the stained area because this residue could kill the live enzymes, making the enzymatic cleaner useless.
By using the UV light method to find all the lingering cat urine stains and applying a proven-effective cleaner, you could be rid of all your cat pee problems in one day. With a particularly deep or wide-spread stain, you may need more than one application even of the best product, but as long as you’re working with a highly recommended product, don’t give up too soon.
You can solve your cat’s inappropriate urination problems and get your home completely free of cat urine odors, but the solutions may not always be obvious. Instead of wasting time learning by trial and error, read the book Cat Urine Problems Eliminated to discover proven-effective ways to retrain your cat and regain your home.
