Cats in Crawl Space
paddiemac
| Posted in General Questions on
I just read your article about how to control crawl space air. I have a situation where cats got under our house and made it their home for a few weeks. They sprayed and defecated under the house in the cold months. They even had a few kittens! As we removed the cats we noticed lots of frozen pee puddles. We tried using vinegar to clean up the smell and removed the poop. As the temps have started going up, we keep smelling cat pee. Any advice on how to remove the smell and clean the crawl space? It’s encapsulated and all the vents have been sealed so the smell comes up through our air vents.
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The way to deal with odors is to remove the substance causing the odor.
Yes, of course that was the first thing we did. Cats, kittens, pee, and poop all removed.
What ended up working out for you. I have the same problem and I used clorox and vinegar. Still smells like pee. Any information would help. Thank you
Sammash,
See my post #2.
I wanted to know the exact product that worked the best for them.
Sammash,
Enzyme based cleaners designed for cat urine all work well. There isn't much to choose between them. If you have a big area to work on you might want to buy a larger sized jug from Amazon. Pet stores often only sell smaller spray bottles.
paddiemac,
Pet stores sell very effective enzyme sprays. They completely get rid of urine odors.
Hadn’t even thought of pet stores having something for that. Seems obvious now. Thank you.
There is a product called "urine destroyer" made by "Nature's Miracle". It is an enzymatic cleaner made specifically to work with urine. Since you had cats, make sure to get the "cat" version of the product (they also make one for dogs). The product uses enzymes to chemically break down the urine and get rid of the stink. I've used this product on carpet, various fabrics, and even wood before with good results.
What I would recommend is to remove everything you can see, along with any contaminated debris that you can see. Now get an ultraviolet flashlight (lots are available on Amazon, just search for "UV flashlight") to look for any you missed -- cat urine will glow brightly under UV light. Treat ALL the areas you find with that urine destroyer product, and remember that you need to *saturate* the contaminated areas with it for it to work. You may need several treatments to get the smell completely gone.
I've used this particular enzymatic cleaner to clean nasty cat urine smells all the way down into the carpet pad on a few ocassions, and while that might take 3-4 treatments and days of soaking, it does work. Note that you'll use more of the stuff than you might expect, so get the spray bottle AND at least one of the big refill jugs for it too.
When you're done with the enzymatic cleaner, I'd clean any poly liners or other cleanable surfaces with a regular cleaner and some paper towels to get rid of any remaining goo. BE SURE to use the ENZYMATIC cleaner first though. If you do it the other way around, using something like Clorox first, you can mess things up chemically and decrease the effectiveness of the enzymatic cleaner.
Bill