A clean carpet will always help to preserve and maintain a pleasant home environment. Few conditions are more irritating than a lingering foul odor that comes up from the carpeting in a home. People have various levels of tolerance to bad odors, but a smelly carpet is very problematic for most people and especially those who are very sensitive to odors.

Carpet acts as a filter, so many things can cause carpet to smell bad. It could be caused by minor deposits of soil, dust, pollen, animal dander, cooking oil, grease or atmospheric gases. Soil that is tracked into the home on shoe soles may have come from factories with pollutants, garages, lawns and gardens, road asphalt etc.

Human and animal hair, lint, fibers from clothing, skin scales, body oils, and food and drink spills all may be deposited unto carpet in the home at some time or another. These can react chemically with each other or the carpet fibers, or they can provide food for microbes which generate obnoxious odors as a by-product of their digestive processes.

To remove the odor, we may either mask it by trying to cover it up, or remove the odor source.

Masking is done by applying a substance that replaces the unpleasant odor with a pleasant one – like a perfume.

Simple carpet cleaning will remove most  sources of bad odor mentioned above, and the carpet will smell much better. However, the worst carpet odors are usually caused by mold, mildew and urine, and are more difficult to eliminate.

Mold and mildew will grow where the carpet is not dry and there is moisture and food – like what you will find among dirty carpet fibers. The bad odor smell does not come from the mold itself but from their waste which is worked on by bacteria. So in order to get rid of this kind of smell, it is necessary not only to neutralize the chemicals produced by the bacteria, but also to kill the bacteria with suitable disinfectants.

Most carpet cleaning professionals will use a Quaternary Ammonium compound to do this. Most of the time, mold problems occur under the carpet, and it would be necessary to lift the carpet and treat the underside. But that is another story.

Another good method of deodorization, is enzyme treatment which is used primarily for removal of odors caused by urine. Enzymes will digest the organic material and bacteria that are responsible for the problem. This type of treatment is therefore most effective for removal of odors caused by bacteria which grows in the carpet and break down the urine, transforming it into amino-acids, thus causing the pungent ammonia like urine smell.

In all cases, in order to remove odors, the source of the contamination must first be determined. A well-trained professional carpet cleaning company will do this for you.

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