Urine Contamination Systems Indicator Guide Concept

Over 20 years ago, my father was hired to teach group of interior designers how to clean upholstery.

As he recalls: "I knew I was in trouble the moment I saw them. They were wearing the finest garments, bracelets, and several rings.....and that was just the men!"

These individuals were, of course, people who understood fabric, but not the complexities of cleaning the fabric. Nevertheless, they wanted to have a system to care for the furnishings that they sold, so they needed to be trained.

All of the standard (and complex) methods of testing and cleaning that existed at that time were beyond their grasp (or at least their interest), so Lee had to come up with a simpler system of testing, inspection, and cleaning that made sense to such people.

In one evening, he created the Fine Fabric Care Systems Indicator Guide. This guide has been used for decades since as one of the easiest and most reliable ways to test, identify, then easily and safely clean upholstery.

Last month, he challenged me to do the same thing with pet odor treatment systems.

In the field of pet odor control, cleaners sometimes find the array of products, tools, and potential scenarios for treatment to be very confusing. This problem is much the same as upholstery cleaning used to be before the invention of the system indicator guide for upholstery.

The simplest means of narrowing down and defining the processes need to correct pet odor control begin with identifying the three treatment conditions that most often exist:

1. Surface Treatment. Pet damaged carpets that require only surface treatment have little odor, the event that caused the contamination was recent, and only repeated once or twice, if at all.

2. Sub Surface Treatment: Carpets that require sub surface treatment have odor that is more readily identified, the deposits are weeks or perhaps months old, and the animal has "visited" the area several times.

3. Restorative Treatment: Restorative Treatment is needed when the odor becomes overpowering, the animal has continued to contaminate the carpet over several months or years, and this long term, repeated contact has saturated the carpet, cushion and flooring.

In my next blog, I'll discuss the inspection tools needed to determine which contamination level is present, and what will be necessary to restore the carpet and remove the odor.