Let’s face it – accidents happen, and sometimes that includes a not-so-pleasant encounter with urine on your carpets. But here’s the silver lining: it’s not a big deal if you’ve got the right tools in your cleaning arsenal.
Whether you’re tired of that lingering odor or just want to know the best way to banish it from your carpets, you’re in the right spot. We’re here to spill the beans on how to effectively eliminate pee stains and odors from your carpets, complete with some expert tricks up our sleeves. Say goodbye to those pesky stains and hello to fresh, clean carpets!
What Works!
I don’t know why everyone keeps suggesting vinegar for everything, but that stuff is not going to help much when it comes to human pee or even feces. (Many of these steps will work well to clean Feces/Poop also)
What does work are chemicals made to eat organic matter like pee. What you need is an Enzyme Cleaner like this one here (Amazon Link Ad) if you want to get rid of the pee from your carpets. Enzymes naturally eat organic matter like pee, vomit, and feces – this will also remove the smells too.
Another common item everyone keeps saying to use is Baking Soda; you never want to sprinkle this stuff on your carpets. Vacuuming up baking soda can be bad for vacuum cleaners, I go into detail why here.
Click Here to See Sunny & Honey Enzyme Cleaner Price and Reviews (Amazon Link Ad)
Step 1
Grab a towel and try to absorb as much of the pee as possible. Go crazy with the towels as you need to get as much of the urine in the towel as possible; this will make cleaning the carpets easier in the next steps.
When you have absorbed as much as you can with the towel, then you need to clean the towels from the human urine too. I would not throw them in the washer just yet unless you like your washer to smell like pee. I recommend filling up your bathtub with warm water and add some baking soda to the mix along with laundry detergent. Allow the towels to soak in the water and then wring them out and put them in the washing machine. Letting them pre-soak is an excellent way to get most of the waste out of them before putting in the washer.
Step 2
Grab the Enzyme Cleaner and spray the area where the waste lays. Allow the Enzyme Cleaner to sit for 10 minutes or the time that the cleaner recommends.
With a new clean towel get it wet with warm water and scrub the carpets area where the cleaner is. Make sure to rinse out the towel every so often at the sink with fresh new warm water. It’s important to do this as you only want to be scrubbing with a fresh warm water towel and not a pee-soaked towel.
Step 3
Once you have scrubbed a couple of times, the waste should be mostly gone if not all gone. But for good measure and to make the area dry again I like to take a shop vacuum and suck up the wet spot. Make sure to have the shop vacuum setup for sucking up liquids.
If you don’t have a shop vacuum, then you really need to consider one. If you have kids or pets, a shop vacuum is a must, and It’s probably fair to say that either one is the reason why you have waste on the carpet in the first place. If you had a shop vacuum, you could have avoided using the towels in step 1 and just used the shop vacuum to suck it up instead. Then sprayed the area with the enzyme cleaner and sucked that up.
What I like to do is use a Shop Vacuum for my floors and spray the area with the enzyme cleaner and suck it up with the shop vacuum. This way I know all the little bits of pee are sucked up, and it dries the carpets a little faster too.
Do not use a regular vacuum cleaner to suck up wet messes as that can kill them. You never know what messes the kids or pets will make and having a shop vacuum is a must for any home. From pet hair, waste, glass, drinks, spiders, you name it – a shop vacuum is a must to take care of those messes.
Vinegar and Baking Soda
For some odd reason using baking soda or vinegar to clean things is all the trend you see on the internet. These homemade cleaners don’t do so well when it comes to pee.
Sure it may look like it will get the stain up, but actually, they don’t attack the smell. And if there is a smell then the pee is not gone.
Soaked In Urine Stain
If the human waste has given time to sit in for days or even weeks, then you might need to go stronger. You need to soak up the waste as soon as possible or else it sits deep into the carpets.
Many Enzyme Cleaners will go deep into the carpets to get the stain so always try that first. If the Enzyme Cleaner does not work then you have 2 options – You either get rid of the carpets or get a carpets cleaner.
If this waste stain is a one-off type of thing then any hardware store “Rug Doctor” will do just fine and works quite well to clean your carpets. Who knows, maybe your carpets are due for a good cleaning anyway?
If this is common, you have kids or pets that sometimes have accidents then you might want to get a carpet cleaner. Many of the steps above can be avoided with a good carpet cleaner. They even make spot carpet cleaners like this one here (Amazon Link Ad) for small accidents.