Best Cat Urine Remover: How to Get Rid of Cat Pee Smell

How to Get Rid of Cat Pee Smell

If your cat has problems making it to the litter box or with inappropriate marking behaviors, your home probably, unfortunately, smells like cat pee. This smell can originate from multiple places including the carpet, walls, clothes, sheets, and other areas in the home. You probably will feel overwhelmed at first and not know where to start. That’s why our complete guide for how to get cat urine out of carpet, walls, floors, and clothes is broken down by section to help you solve your problem.

Preparation for Cleaning Cat Pee

The first thing you want to do when preparing to clean cat urine out of anywhere is to gather the necessary materials. That’s going to include gloves, paper towels, detergent, and the best carpet cleaner for cat urine that you can find.

Another good idea is to clean your house thoroughly and get everything that is not affected by cat pee out of the way so that you can focus and move quickly. Try and gather clothing that is affected in one area to make your laundry process easier and also keep track of which furniture and carpeting need to be treated.  

Once you have all of your supplies and your home organized and ready for treatment, you can begin. We recommend starting with the carpets. Carpets are an important area to treat because they allow cat pee to sit and settle and that can make your home smell pretty bad.

How to Get Cat Urine Smell out of Carpet

Getting cat urine and the cat urine smell out of your carpet is probably one of the top items on your list of areas to treat. That’s because bad carpeting smell and appearance look bad when you have guests over, and carpets also happen to be one of the most heavily affected areas of the home when it comes to cat pee.

Even if it is a priority for you, you might not know where to start. Cat urine is incredibly potent, and if it’s been sitting in the carpet for a while, it’s going to be hard to lift out and to relieve the smell. Not to worry, though. Our guide is going to go through how to clean dried cat urine from carpet floors and point out the best enzymatic cleaner for cat urine, which is going to really help with the smell.

Clean What You Can

If you have seen your cat urinate somewhere in your home and it is not dried yet, the first step is going to be removing as much urine as possible. This fast action is crucial. The more that you remove when it first happens, the less you will have to deal with later and the less that your home will smell of cat urine.

If your cat has urinated on furniture or carpet, you should blot the area with a very absorbent paper towel. This will help to remove a good portion of the urine before you get to the deep cleaning. If your cat has urinated on blankets, clothing, or drapes, you will have to take a different course of action. Your only recourse here is to have those items dry-cleaned as soon as possible. If you let the urine stay on the fabric for a long time, it’s going to have an odor and be more stubborn when it comes to removal.

If you are doing laundry yourself at home and need to clean clothing, sheets, or blankets, you should find the best cat urine enzyme cleaner available and also utilize detergents with baking soda or enzyme additives. These supplies, when used in combination, should do a great job of cleaning the cat urine out of your cloth items.

Use Enzyme Cleaner

After you have removed as much urine as possible, you’re going to want to break down the stain that is left with an enzymatic cleaner. Enzymatic cleaners have special ingredients that help to break down the urine. They do this by “eating” it, and they leave behind more sanitary items that smell much better. Finding a good enzyme cleaner is essential for your urine-cleaning mission.

Next, you should clean the area with an extracting wet vac. Making the distinction between wet vacs and steam cleaners is important.  You should not use steam cleaners or other cleaners that utilize heat to remove stains because heat can cause the odors and stains to set in even more on carpet and fabrics.

Use a Wet Vacuum or Carpet Cleaner

Using a wet vac carpet cleaner can remove the stain, and it leaves little mess because it sucks the water back into the tank. It’s important to use this method to rinse the affected area with cool water. The wet vac should be used on carpeting but is obviously not so practical for upholstery and furniture.

How to Get Cat Pee Out of Clothes

Clothes are definitely an area that cat urine affects heavily. If your cat has urinated on you or your family’s clothes, there are some general tips that you need to know if you want to clean them properly. First off, though, you need some materials, you should get paper towels, oxygen bleach, white vinegar, baking soda, and an enzyme laundry detergent.

You might think you’re ready to go once you have these, but you need to do some preparatory work first. Throwing your urine-stained clothes immediately into the washer is not an effective way to deal with cat urine stains. If you do this, the cat urine will likely just set in further into the fabric and be way harder to remove. For that reason, you should always pre-treat the affected clothing items.

Preparation

First, rinse the stained area with cool, clean water from a sink. You should be dabbing the area with dry paper towels to absorb as much urine up as possible. You should avoid doing a scrubbing motion, as this will only drive the stain deeper into the fabric. This part of the process is the same as it is when dealing with carpeting in that the goal is to remove as much urine as possible in the preliminary stages before the actual treatment.

Soak the Clothing

Next, fill a sink or large bucket with water. It’s time to soak and pre-treat the clothing. You should add a half-cup of your selected oxygen bleach into the bucket or sink. There are several types of oxygen bleaches out there, and which one you pick doesn’t much matter. Once you have combined the water and oxygen bleach, mix them together and place your affected clothing items into the water to soak. You should leave your clothes in the water for one to three hours.

Once your clothing items are done soaking, you are ready to move on to the next stage of the treatment process. Now, you need to wash them in vinegar. Mix a cup of white vinegar in with three cups of cold water. Dip your clothes in the solution and afterward, let it sit for a few minutes. Use baking soda to cover the affected area to help with the smell.

Washing

Finally, you are ready to start using the laundry machine. However, this takes place in two steps. The first step is to wash the clothing in a washing machine in cold water. This first washing should be done without any laundry detergent. Also, you should avoid using hot or warm water, which can reverse the progress that you’ve already made.

After the first washing, air-dry your items. Do not use a dryer, as this will cause the odor to set in the clothing permanently and make it impossible to get out.

For the second washing, you should use cool water with a detergent that contains enzymes. Enzyme detergents are essential if you want to remove an organic stain like cat urine effectively. It’s not hard to find enzyme-based detergents, and they are pretty affordable as well.

Once the second wash is done, air-dry them again. At this point, there should be no urine smell. Smell your clothing and if it does still contain a urine odor, repeat the second washing again as needed. This extensive process is time-consuming, but if you want to get serious about battling stains and lifting odors in your clothing, it is necessary.

How to Get Rid of Cat Urine Odor in Houses

Now that you have the cat pee out of your carpet and your clothes, you want to deal with the general smell that has been building up in your home forever. That’s understandable, and you’ll be glad to know that it is much simpler than the previous processes for removing cat urine.

Once you have the cat urine removed from your clothing, carpet, or furniture, you can start to return everything to normal and take the finishing steps to ensure that nothing lingers. There are several products out there that you can use. You could treat your carpet with an odor remover salt, which is available from several brands.

However, the remedy that we recommend is quite simple. First, you should give your carpet a good basic cleaning with a carpet cleaning vacuum. Make sure that you’ve completely treated any areas affected by urine first so that you don’t make the stains worse. Once the stains are gone, clean your whole carpet with a carpet cleaner, which can be rented from any hardware store.

After that, you should try to air out your house as much as possible. Open the windows, turn on fans for air movement, and try to cycle through all the stale air. This fresh infusion of air will help to move out any straggling cat urine odor and help it to dissipate.

If you are able to take these steps and make sure that you solve the problem of the cat urinating in the first place, you should be well on your way to a cleaner, better-smelling home.

Enzymatic Cleaner for Cat Urine

In our instructions for cleaning cat urine out of various locations and items in your home, you saw us mention enzyme cleaners a lot. That’s because it’s generally accepted that enzyme cleaners are the best kind of cleaners for dealing with cat urine and the odor that comes with it. You can use enzyme cleaners to treat your clothes, linens, carpets, or furniture. Enzyme cleaners are available in a variety of cleaning product types including detergent, carpet cleaner, and even air fresheners.

The reason that enzyme cleaners are so good for dealing with these kinds of stains is the way they work on a molecular level. Enzyme cleaners are superb for combatting organic stains like cat urine because the enzymes within eat away the bacteria and other undesirable matter. What they leave behind is cleaner and better-smelling.

Best Enzyme Cleaner for Cat Urine

If you are going to invest in an enzyme cleaner to deal with the cat urine in your home, you might as well do it right.  The best enzyme cleaner in our list is the Mister Max Original Scent Odor Remover. We’ll go more in-depth into this product later, but it’s very widely used as a way to clean and remove odors from areas that are affected by animal urine.

Best Cat Urine Remover

Finally, we’ve arrived to our review section. In this buying guide, we’re going to review various products and eventually name a winner for the best cleaner for cat urine. Our decision will be based on features, pricing, and the feedback that these products receive.