Neutralizing Instead Of Masking Household Odors
Effectively neutralizing odors is not as simple as we thought it was! Sounds like a simple problem that should have a simple solution, but it doesn’t. Eliminating unpleasant odors requires that you know something about what’s causing them….really causing them! That’s not obvious, even if you think you know where the unwanted smell is coming from. We had several odors we needed to neutralize, and fast, because a family member was going thru an extensive course of chemo treatments and they spent most of the day convalescing in the living room – the house has an open floor plan and keeping the windows and doors open during winter was not an option.
With a large family and visitors coming and going to see the patient, the kitchen was a hub of cooking and baking activity which left the house was full, of what we thought were pleasant aromas! However, the ‘patient’, undergoing the chemo, developed an acute sense of smell and he’d throw-up when odors would drift over to him where he lay in the living room.
We tried everything to eliminate the cooking smells; we researched online and turfed up many ways to do this. The first attempt was what we’d always done – buy a can of aerosol freshener and spray it into the air; how simple is that? Well, it’s wrong! This only made him sicker.
If you want to know why this did not work, read the ingredients on those cans! The perfumes in those, so called, ‘fresheners’ are actually ‘masking agents’ and they are highly toxic for some people and very unpleasant for some pets! I found this very upsetting to think that we made our family member sicker when all we were trying to do was make the air fresher so he could breath without throwing up.
The suggestions we got from our google searches all promised to get rid of unwanted odors; here are just a few of them:
- Leave an open box of baking soda in the room – sprinkle it on the carpet and vacuum it up after several hours;
- Cut a few fresh lemons in half and set them around the room; if this fails, do the same with apples;
- Put vanilla on a few light bulbs and then turn them on;
- Boil two parts water and one part vinegar in the microwave to rid the house of smelly and clinging odors – the scent of vinegar will at first be everywhere but soon dissipates;
- Soak a piece of bread soaked in vinegar and leave it out in the room you want to remove the odors from;
- Grind citrus rinds in the garbage disposal to freshen the room;
- Removing human or pet urine and vomit from furniture or the carpet was what we really needed to know how to do! Someone suggested that we remove what we could and then spray it with the 3 – parts cold water to 1-part vinegar solution then blot – don’t scrub it. Repeat several times until it is removed. ( gee, what fun! )
- Burn botanical oils in appropriate burners; (could have been fun if it worked!)
Some things worked for awhile but nothing worked for our chemo patient; that’s why we’re writing this for anyone who’s having the same problem.
We learned that enzymes produce bacteria, and a concentration of those bacterial strains are what’s responsible for removing both stains and odors! It’s simple – fight fire with fire.
Bad smells are caused from bacteria, so we bought a product that kills the bacteria and that safely dealt with our problem. We found this one called, ‘SUNzyme Organic Stain & Odor Control.
We didn’t look at all of the products making that claim, but we tested a few by first reading the labels and then picked the ones that listed the highest concentration of enzymes per gallon.
Good Luck!
