July 7th, 2021 by Sarah Miles

While carpets keep your home warmer, look luxurious, and feel soft underfoot, they are more difficult to keep clean than hard floors. Spills, accidents, and things you just bring in on your shoes can all mark your carpets, and they may even start to smell.

However, that doesn’t mean you have to trade all your carpets for laminate or lino, as there are solutions for most of the common carpet stains. We take a look at the 3 worst offenders, explain why they’re so hard to deal with/smell so bad, and what you can do about them.

1. Bodily Substances

As unsavoury as this is, bodily substances such as urine, faeces, vomit, and sweat can – and probably will, at some point - all find their way into your carpet. This is most common in homes with pets and children but it’s also easy to tread things in from the street as well. It is, therefore, not a problem exclusive to those with dogs or young families.

5L Odour Attack Carpet Cleaning Solution with Urine Digester Ocean Fresh Fragrance

Price: £24.95

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Why the smell lingers

Even after you have cleaned it up, the smell may continue to hang around. The reason it lingers on is due to the salts and protein that appear in bodily fluids. These salts provide nutrients to bacteria, and will cling to your carpet fibres long after the initial stain has been cleaned up. This isn’t pleasant for anyone but if you have pets this can even cause your dog or cat to continue to use that area as a bathroom as they can still smell it.

What you can do

Forget standard household cleaners: they don’t have the active ingredients needed to break the salts and the bacteria down. You need something specific, such as Pro-Kleen Odour Attack Carpet Cleaner, as this contains enzymes that neutralise the urine and remove the bacteria (and, therefore, the smell).

2. Oil and Grease

It’s as if oil and grease marks, from things like food or brought in from the street on shoes, have their own built-in defence system because they’re so difficult to remove with conventional cleaning products.

Why they’re difficult to remove

Oil and water don’t mix, we know this from our high school science lessons, right? Because most cleaning products are water-based, it’s pretty much impossible to use them to remove an oil-based stain from any fabric or absorbent material.

What you can do

Actually, you probably will already have the best product to deal with this. Perhaps not in your cleaning cupboard, but on your kitchen sink. That’s right, good old washing up liquid. The primary job of a dish detergent is removing food-based dirt from pots, pans, and plates so it works really well on oil marks on carpets, furniture, and even clothes. Use this in the first instance to break down the oil and then follow up with a carpet cleaner, such as Pro-Kleen Carpet Shampoo, to remove any stains and get it smelling lovely and fresh again.

5L Pro+ Lavender Carpet Shampoo

The Pro+ is the newest carpet cleaning solution by Pro-Kleen that tackles and prevents stubborn stains whilst leaving your carpet smelling fresh.

Price: £17.95

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3. Milk

Is there any worse liquid to spill into a carpet than milk? Whether it’s a dropped bowl of cornflakes or an upended cup of tea, you just know that milk is going to go sour and really start to hum.

What sour milk does in your carpet

Milk breaks down pretty quickly at room temperature and develops bacteria (think about how sick drinking off milk can make you). The bacteria react with the lactose in the milk, and this is what smells. Untreated, the bacteria will continue to multiply so not only will it smell increasingly sour; it’s really unhygienic too.

What you can do

The nastiness caused by milk is very similar in composition to urine so using urine destroying carpet cleaner, like the one already mentioned, is a really good solution and will neutralise all the unpleasantness.