These instructions are applicable whether you have a consumer upright, a professional portable or a "spotter" (a little portable extractor such as the red one shown below) and whether your machine offers heat or not.

Many users simply apply their DooDoo Voodoo by pouring, wiping or spraying, then they let it air dry and they're finished.  Some of us, though, have urine problems that are more widespread and that may benefit from a little extra work with a carpet cleaning machine.

One option is to put DooDoo Voodoo Concentrate and water in your machine in lieu of your regular cleaning solution (see notes below).  If you desire to use our product in this way, we suggest that you add 1/2 ounce or 1 ounce of DooDoo Voodoo per gallon of water, though your needs may vary based on your machine and your level of contamination.  You can either add the Concentrate to the supply tank of your machine (once you verify your tank's capacity and do the math) or you can mix Concentrate with water in a bucket, then pour the mixture into your supply tank.

If you have specific areas that have been soiled, as verified by smelling them or using a DooDoo Voodoo Blacklight, treat them first per our usual instructions.  Once they're odor-free and fully dry, then you can do your whole-room cleaning with your machine.  It's important that you let the specifically treated areas dry fully so as to get the maximum odor-killing action.

DooDoo Voodoo's chemistry can yield some foam (suds), so you may want to use less DooDoo Voodoo or add a little defoamer, which is a type of product designed to cut down on suds when using a carpet cleaning machine.  Typically, the defoamer is added to the waste water (recovery) tank of the carpet cleaning machine to cut down on suds there because excessive foaming can damage the vacuum motor in a carpet cleaning machine.  You can purchase defoamer on eBay, at stores where they rent carpet cleaning equipment (ACE Hardware, Lowe's, etc.) and from carpet cleaning supply dealers.

If you have a large area to treat, and desire to apply DooDoo Voodoo and let it dwell (stay on the carpet for awhile before using your machine to extract it), we have found that an easy and quick way to apply a large amount of DooDoo Voodoo is as follows.  If you have isolated spots where an animal has urinated, or if you're concerned about your subfloor (hardwood, perhaps) or if you're above the ground floor, this method may not be for you.  You also may not need to soak the area quite as much as we did.  Only you can determine if this method is appropriate for your situation and environment.

We use a 5-gallon bucket & lid we bought at a home improvement store, and a 32-ounce plastic measuring cup such as you might have in your kitchen.  We fill the bucket with hot water almost to the top, then add DooDoo Voodoo Concentrate at a rate of up to two ounces per gallon of water.  In this example, we added 10 ounces of DooDoo Voodoo Concentrate to our almost-full 5-gallon bucket.  If you use this method, you'll find that if you fill the bucket with water first, then add your DooDoo Voodoo Concentrate, you'll get a lot less foaming than you would if you put your DooDoo Voodoo Concentrate in the bucket first, then filled the bucket with hot water.  Stir the mixture to evenly distribute the DooDoo Voodoo Concentrate.

Dip the plastic measuring cup in the 5-gallon bucket, then use it to pour the DooDoo Voodoo on the areas of your carpet that need treatment.  Be sure to fully saturate the areas.  By pouring the DooDoo Voodoo in this way, you get a lot less aerosolization than you would if you sprayed it...plus, it would take a LOT of spraying to fully wet the carpet, pad and subfloor.  It's simply a lot quicker to pour the DooDoo Voodoo on the affected areas.  You can also pour directly from the 5-gallon bucket.

If you think the pour-from-the-bucket-or-measuring-cup method is too aggressive for you, you can also pretty easily, but not as extensively, soak an area by spraying DooDoo Voodoo with a pump sprayer.  We've used 1-gallon and 2.5-gallon units, with the 1-gallon units being lighter, but needing to be refilled more often.  Here's a picture of two brands of 1-gallon pump sprayers:

Here are two pictures of areas in our living room where we recently had repeated urination by our housecats.  It looked to us as if they'd peed in these areas a few dozen times, based on what we saw under the blacklight.  These pictures were taken after I had saturated the areas by pouring DooDoo Voodoo with my plastic measuring cup.  (Click on the thumbnail pictures to see 640x480 versions.)

After you pour enough DooDoo Voodoo on the areas needing treatment, it's time to gently help the DooDoo Voodoo spread out in the pad and subfloor by tamping it down with your foot.  This is necessary because carpet pad is a dense material comprised of millions of tiny cells.  By gently pushing your foot down all over the areas where you poured DooDoo Voodoo, you're helping drive the DooDoo Voodoo deep into the cellular structure of the carpet pad, as well as helping force the DooDoo Voodoo down through the pad to the subfloor, which is where long-term odor-causing urine lingers.  Here's a wide shot of the same two areas shown above after I tamped them with my sneaker.  Lying on the back of the couch and supervising my work is Georgette, one of the two guilty parties.  The red machine is the commercial-grade carpet extractor I use.

Once you've tamped the areas down with your foot, let the DooDoo Voodoo dwell (remain) on the areas for at least a half hour (up to two hours is okay, but you don't want the surface of the carpet to dry first) before extracting the areas with your carpet cleaning machine.  When you do your extraction, it is a good practice to extract the areas three times in alternating directions.  For instance, first extract parallel to the wall, then extract perpendicular to the wall, then do a final extraction parallel to the wall again.  Here's a picture I shot while I was doing my second pass with the 4" extraction wand.  You can see that my first pass was parallel to the wall, and that my second pass is perpendicular to the wall.

After you do your final extraction pass, spray the areas with enough DooDoo Voodoo to pretty thoroughly wet the areas you just cleaned.  In my case, I had an empty bottle that had previously been filled with ready-to-use DooDoo Voodoo, so I simply stuck the bottle down in the 5-gallon bucket to fill it.  Here's a picture after I did my final extraction pass (which you can see was parallel to the wall) and sprayed the areas (including the walls up to about 18") with DooDoo Voodoo:

While I was in the process of putting this webpage together, I walked to the living room to see how the areas were drying and there was no urine odor present at all...just a really faint scent of DooDoo Voodoo.

The surface of your carpet will dry first, then it can take 2-4 days for the pad and subfloor to completely dry, after which time you shouldn't have any odor left.  If you do, one of three things has occurred.  Either your pad & subfloor haven't fully dried, or the DooDoo Voodoo you poured didn't get to all the areas where the urine was or you didn't use a strong enough mixture.  You may not have treated a wide enough area, or may not have tamped the areas enough to drive the DooDoo Voodoo deep enough into the cells of your carpet pad and through to your subfloor.  As we've noted elsewhere on this site, based on the physics of odor remediation, what urine DooDoo Voodoo touches, it absolutely eradicates, so make sure you get DooDoo Voodoo in contact with all your urine.

If you flood the area in this way and you have light-colored carpet like we do, you may notice some yellowing of the carpet over the next week or two. This isn’t DooDoo Voodoo discoloring your carpet; it’s wicking (surfacing from below) of the urine that was deep down in your carpet pad or, more likely, subflooring. If this occurs, you can treat the surface of your carpet with DooDoo Voodoo, then re-extract the area with your carpet cleaning machine, which is what we did a couple weeks after the pictures were shot. There was no odor left in the area; just a bit of yellowing due to wicking from our subfloor.

After you've done your work with your carpet cleaning machine, be sure to flush it out with clean water per the manufacturer's instructions.  This is very important.  Leaving solution in contact with the seals inside a machine can dry them out and cause them to fail.  Rinse thoroughly and let air-dry.

Notes:

1.  This pour-then-extract method is only intended for use on wall-to-wall carpeting with pad underneath it.  If you have, for example, an oriental rug, you can apply DooDoo Voodoo in the conventional method with your carpet cleaning machine.

2.  In lieu of dipping a plastic measuring cup or pouring directly from your 5-gallon bucket, you can also wet the areas by pouring DooDoo Voodoo from a gardener's sprinkling can:

3.  Leaving an area dark and moist for too long can encourage mold growth, so use plenty of ventilation and light.  Air movers, box fans, open windows, HVAC and ceiling fans are helpful in this regard.  Use good judgment and common sense, as our company assumes no liability.  If you're concerned about this issue, you might be best served to, instead of doing the job yourself, find a local carpet cleaning company that uses a patented device called the WaterClaw.  It is designed to remove over 90% of moisture from carpet, pad and subfloor, thus leaving areas a lot drier after cleaning.  The manufacturer of the WaterClaw has a webpage where you can look up carpet cleaning equipment & supply (wholesale only) distributors in your area.  By contacting the one closest to you, you stand a good chance of their being able to refer you to a carpet cleaning company that is equipped with the WaterClaw.  We use multiple WaterClaws and have found them to work INCREDIBLY well with DooDoo Voodoo.  A WaterClaw gets out WAY more contaminants than a conventional "wand-type" cleaning ever will.  If your urine problems are more than you can handle by yourself, we highly recommend that you locate a cleaner who uses WaterClaws.  You'll be amazed at the results attained as compared to what a regular carpet cleaning would yield.  You can read the distributor list on their website here:  http://www.hydroforce.com/distrib_locator.html.  Here are two pictures of what a WaterClaw can remove from carpet, pad and subfloor...and the carpet this came out of wasn't even that dirty to the naked eye.

4.  If you desire to, you can agitate the areas by hand once you've applied the DooDoo Voodoo.  We use a plastic scrub brush we bought at the local "super mart" for less than two bucks.  (We've also seen them at the dollar stores.)  Here are pictures of the type we use:

5.  Some manufacturers of consumer-grade carpet cleaning machines are now putting out disclaimers urging people not to use any other brand of cleaning solution but the manufactures' due to the possibility of damage to the carpet cleaning machines.  We think that the potential for damage to a machine would be lessened if you only used the machine to extract DooDoo Voodoo you applied manually to your carpet instead of using the machine's solution tank to squirt DooDoo Voodoo into your carpet.  All machines have rubber seals to keep the solutions and waste water (extracted liquid) from leaking, so we assume that the manufacturers are concerned about other solutions drying out the rubber seals and causing them to fail.  We have no way of knowing whether this is a legitimate concern or whether the manufacturers are simply trying to increase sales of their own brands of cleaning solutions, so we leave it up to you to decide whether DooDoo Voodoo and your carpet cleaning machine will work well together.  We have used DooDoo Voodoo with our Hoover FloorMate hard-surface cleaning machine for the last couple years and haven't had any problems, but you can decide for yourself.

6.  We own both professional and consumer carpet extractors, including spotters (lightweight portables such as the red unit shown above).  We have a couple spotters that are sold to the janitorial and hotel industry for use by housekeepers, but we find them to be virtually useless, as they don't develop enough suction.  The red unit shown above is the only spotter we've found to have enough suction to do a decent job.  Don't waste your money on any other, less powerful unit.  If you need a referral to where to buy one of the red units, e-mail us.

As the user of DooDoo Voodoo, you assume all liability, including but not limited to damage to carpet cleaning machinery or personal property.  We are not there to supervise your job or inspect your machinery, so we assume no liability for direct or consequential damages.  User determines suitability for any particular application.

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