Pet Urine Case Studies

In addition to the case study info on this and the linked-to pages, we encourage you to also check out our Stain Removal, Extraction Instructions and Salvaging Pee-Soaked Subfloor pages.  These very well illustrate DooDoo Voodoo's ability to remove unbelievable stains...in just minutes, right before your eyes, as well as indescribable odors.

DooDoo Voodoo alone is phenomenal at removing stains and odors.  But, if your odor problems are more in-depth than you think you can tackle with just DooDoo Voodoo (meaning, your carpet backing, pad and subfloor are soaked with urine), boy do we now have good news for you

NEWS:  We're proud to now be distributors of some fantastic subsurface extraction tools, which are specifically designed to pull impurities from not only your carpet fibers, but also your carpet backing, pad and even subfloor.  These have only been available to professionals, but are now available here and start at just $47.99 with free shipping!

You can learn more about these SOS Subsurface Extraction Tools on our PRODUCTS page (and be sure to follow the Learn More link for tons more photos, case studies and tips).  These tools provide the same functionality as pro-only tools (called Water Claws) that cost hundreds more.

Even many professional carpet cleaners don't possess this level of specialized tooling, so for a very low investment (starting at just $47.99!), you'll be performing pro-level odor and stain remediation yourself...and without even breaking a sweat, because the tool does the work for you.  I highly encourage you to learn more on the PRODUCTS page and to follow the link to our SUBSURFACE page.

Regardless whether you use DooDoo Voodoo or not (and we certainly hope you do!), you and your animals could also benefit from purifying your air.  We put together an educational page about how we accomplish this at our place, so check out our Freshen Air page.  One of our favorite new tools is Dr. Whitaker's Neoair Plus Total Shield air purifier, which we bought more than a dozen of.


· In early 2006, we undertook a whole-condo odor remediation job for a lady whose cats had soiled the home quite extensively, and whose realtor® told her that because of the odor, the condo would sell for $50,000 less than market value.  She was ready to rip out the carpet, pad and tack strips, then treat the subfloor, but we urged her to let us first show her what DooDoo Voodoo could do all by itself.

Interestingly, due to a medical condition, the lady has lost her sense of smell, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Here are some pictures to set the scene for you.  The thing the close-up pictures don't convey is that there was urination throughout the condo, not just in the corners and on the stairs.  It had even run down from the balcony and had crept along the kitchen ceiling.  There was a lot of spray on the walls, not just down by the floor where you might expect it to be, but up the walls from where the cats had sprayed while standing on the back of the couch, chairs, tables, etc.

The first few shots show you the general layout of the condo, which is larger than it appears to be in the pictures due to the nature of the wide-angle lens I used.  Note how pristine the carpet looks under normal lighting versus how it looks under blacklight.    (Click the thumbnail pics to see 640x480 versions.)

To read more of this story and see pictures taken throughout the entire process we went through to rid the place of odor, visit our page about salvaging pee-soaked subfloor.  (There's a lot of info for those of you who may have urine or feces infiltration of your subfloor.)  You can also download the whole case study as a PDF file (1.4MB in size).

If you're in the Indianapolis area and need this sort of work performed, please contact us.  If you just need carpet cleaning and are in the Indy area, we recommend Kolby Carpet Cleaning Company.  They've cleaned our carpet for years and do a good, affordable job.  Call them at 317-861-0211.  Kolby cleans in the following counties:  Marion, Hamilton, Boone, Hancock, Johnson, Hendricks and Morgan.

Looking from the foyer out toward the river.  Beautiful view.

The condo is in a very desirable area on the north side of Indy.

The condo's layout is really cool.  I bet the cats loved it.

 

   

The master bedroom.

The balcony over the kitchen.

 

     

   

Sprayed urine running
down the wall & creeping along
the baseboard.

     

The mattress of a $6,000 mattress
& mechanized box spring combo.

A favorite area of the master bed-
room under normal lighting.

The same area under blacklight.

 

   

Urine around a register and down in the ductwork.

Urine along the edge of where a desk was.

The stairs, showing vomit and urine stains.

     

     

Repeated spraying.

More spraying in another corner.

Notice the sprayed urine running down both walls.

     
 

To read more of this story and see pictures taken throughout the process we went through to rid the place of odor, click here.

To see pictures taken in one of our bedrooms while I was remediating urine, vomit and poop stains from our little special-needs dog, Rocky, click here.

To see the blacklight we use and sell, visit our PRODUCTS page.  To see a comparison between types of blacklights, visit this page.
 


· Shown is the landing at the bottom of the stairway leading to our basement. Gracie, the cat on the left, is in the doorway to the room where the litter boxes are. To Gracie’s left, in front of the light-colored section of wall, the cats had peed a few dozen times, plus they had peed on the wall to Gracie’s right, on the door behind Georgette (the cat on the right), on the French doors just visible at the far right of the picture and on the wall where the bottom stair and the French doors meet. Nothing else got the smell out, but DooDoo Voodoo did.

Recently, our water softener broke and flooded the whole area a couple times before we figured out what the problem was. The staining you see in the carpet is due to wicking from that flooding, not urination or DooDoo Voodoo. Interestingly, though, even when the whole carpeted area was soaked (not just moist), it didn’t smell at all. I haven’t used my carpet cleaning machine on the area yet, hence the temporary staining you see as a remnant of the water softener flood. Isn’t it great, though, that (a) the area didn’t smell at all even when it was soaking wet; (b) the cats have never re-soiled the area; and (c) Gracie is contentedly lying there as if nothing were wrong at all...when previously she was peeing in this area more than once a day? I absolutely defy you to find another odor control product on the planet that would have facilitated this the way DooDoo Voodoo has. No way; no how. Excuse the wide-angle lens distortion, but I wanted to get the whole area in the picture so you’d get a good feel for how many places the cats had peed.

The wicking visible is from old urine, other odor neutralizers and more that had been trapped in the carpet backing, the carpet pad and the concrete under the carpet pad. When the water softener flooded the area, the moisture and salt brought the contaminants up to the surface. If I were to treat the whole area with DooDoo Voodoo, it probably would get rid of the wicking discoloration, but I’ll go the extra yard and extract the carpet with my carpet cleaning machine. Interestingly, though not surprising to me given what I know about DooDoo Voodoo’s chemistry, is that even though all these contaminants resurfaced, there is no odor...thanks to the treatments I had done previously with DooDoo Voodoo.

TIP:  If you want to preclude such wicking and soil migration, you need to learn more about what's called subsurface extraction.  Visit our PRODUCTS page and the linked-to SUBSURFACE page to learn more.  Basically, subsurface tools (which we sell for as little as $47.99 with free shipping) flush DooDoo Voodoo and water through your carpet fibers, backing, pad and subfloor so thoroughly that it's like running your carpet, pad and subfloor through a washing machine!™  There is NO better way to get rid of any types of stains and odors than subsurface extraction.  The good news is that it's CHEAP to get into and WAY easier than regular carpet cleaning!  Learn more here.

Update:  Here are some pictures from when I worked on the area with the carpet extractor.

The area after the water softener
flooded it.  It was soaking wet.

After I mixed up some DooDoo Voodoo and soaked the area by pouring with the sprinkling can.

   

After tamping the area with my tennis shoes.  Notice the tightly spaced footprints.

Some of what I extracted.  Yuch!  Thanks to DooDoo Voodoo, this didn't stink at all; it just looked gnarly.

 


Tile & Grout
Many people think that carpet and carpet pad are the toughest things to get pee smell out of, but tile grout can be a lot tougher, actually, due to its porosity. If you have an odor problem in your grout, you will achieve the best results by putting a strong mixture of DooDoo Voodoo, or actual DooDoo Voodoo Concentrate, on your grout lines. At this strength, DooDoo Voodoo's scientific action may lighten the grout—which is a benefit, not a detriment—but we want to make sure you’re aware of this in advance.  To apply DooDoo Voodoo to your grout lines, you can use a little squeeze bottle with a spout cap, typically available for a buck or less in the health & beauty aids department of your local discount store.

In our guest bath (pictured to the right), we had repeated urination for a few years before DooDoo Voodoo’s formula was finalized. Nothing (meaning competing products) would get rid of the smell, so the cats kept whizzing there and the entire area to the left, right and behind the toilet was horribly stinky. Once we finalized our formula and used DooDoo Voodoo on the area, we got rid of the smell for good and no cat has ever re-soiled the area. The greatest part of the story, though, is that even though the cats’ urine had soaked repeatedly into the bottom of the antique cabinet’s legs, DooDoo Voodoo got out the smell 100%..and no cat has ever been back to the area to make a new deposit. This is a great example of DooDoo Voodoo’s effectiveness on an area where other products had already failed. (By the way, don’t you think cocoa brown is a great color for a bathroom?)

Now, I'd like to mention a product to you:  GroutShield.  While I've not used it specifically for the purpose of sealing in odors in grout (and I did not use it in the bathroom shown), I have used it for coloring/sealing grout, with good success.  In the real world, it didn't turn out to be quite as easy to use as it looks in the videos (don't let it dry on the tile too long...that's all I'm saying), but it seems like a fantastic product that does what it purports to.  Visit http://www.groutshield.com to learn more.

I, personally, have found that DooDoo Voodoo is a FANTASTIC cleaner and brightener for grout, not to mention its odor-killing abilities.  But if you desire to change your grout's color and keep liquids and dirt out of it, I recommend GroutShield.


· From our archives (okay, a box on a shelf in our basement), here are some pictures of indiscriminate urination we were fighting back in the '80s when we started working on DooDoo Voodoo.  We had a really cute house, built in the '40s, and it had beautiful carpeting and hardwood floors...until some of our rescued cats started their peeing contest.  These three pictures show only a couple of the many areas we were dealing with.

Click on the thumbnails to see 640-pixel-wide versions of the pictures.

This is what the hardwood floor looked like after we pulled the carpet back and removed the pad and the tack strips.  Urine is so caustic that it will eat right through polyurethane.  I'm sure that many of you can relate to this.

   

This is after we had cleaned the floor.  Obviously, the staining from the urine salts (shown in the picture above) had temporarily gone away due to having been wetted by the cleaning solution.  Can you believe the amount of urine staining on the back of the carpet???  Subsurface extraction is what we needed, but it wasn't invented yet!  You can do it yourself now for $39.99!

   

This is a picture of the landing of the basement stairs, where the cats had urinated so much, it ate through the vinyl tiles' adhesive.  We had treated the floor, then covered it with black plastic before putting new underlayment over it. 

After seeing these pictures, which don't even capture all the areas we were working on, I'm sure you can understand why we were so motivated to develop DooDoo Voodoo.  You see, we're not just some capitalists out here trying to sell you something.  We know exactly what you're going through...because we went through the exact same trials & tribulations you are!  Before we perfected DooDoo Voodoo, we had to throw away toasters, laser printers, couches and lots more furnishings because of indiscriminate urination.

Our own experiences, coupled with our decades of animal charity work, helped us understand the importance of developing a product that really, truly could get rid of pet urine odor.  We knew how angry we felt when our rescued animals trashed our house, and we had seen firsthand how many animals were relinquished and euthanized due to indiscriminate urination, so we took our responsibility to develop DooDoo Voodoo very seriously.  It's gratifying to now be seeing DooDoo Voodoo helping pet owners cope with indiscriminate urination and saving so many animals' lives.  Please check out our Testimonials page for satisfied customers' comments.

Somewhere in all our boxes and files I'm sure we have other archive pictures.  We'll post them here when we run across them.

If you've got any photos you'd like to share with us and would allow us to post here on the website for others' benefit, we'd appreciate receiving them.  E-mail them to us in JPG format to info@doodoovoodoo.com.  Let others learn from what you've gone through!