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My new condo smells like the previous owners’ dogs. What can I do?

Q: We recently made an offer to purchase a ground-floor condo with concrete floors featuring radiant heating. It also has the distinct smell of dogs, as the previous three residents owned dogs and the last had one that was elderly and incontinent.

We’re pretty sure the odor will diminish once the seller’s upholstered furniture and area rugs are removed, but we are concerned about residual smells. We plan to wash everything, including counters, floors, walls and woodwork, with a mild detergent and water. We’re hoping we won’t have to paint the walls and ceilings, as that would add a serious amount of work and expense before we could move in. We aren’t sure if the concrete floors have been sealed. How can we determine the source(s) of the odor, and what are the best methods to eliminate it?

A: Dried urine isn’t the only reason a space can reek of dog smells, but it’s one of the key factors. Other sources include shed skin cells (dander) and hair, as well as smells that dogs release from their scent glands or leave when they lick surfaces. You should be able to eliminate the dander and fur with a thorough vacuuming, including along baseboards and maybe even walls.

Opening doors and windows should help clear other smells that don’t go away when the previous owners remove their furniture, rugs or other items, and when dogs are no longer living in the space. You might want to wash countertops just to be sure you are moving into a clean space, but these surfaces aren’t likely to harbor lingering dog smells. Nor is the ceiling. Concentrate on walls and woodwork within the height range of a dog’s pee, and on the floor.

As for urine, a UV flashlight, also known as a black light, can help you pinpoint the location of any deposits. Treat each area you find with an enzyme cleaner that works to neutralize the smells from dog urine.

UV flashlights are rated by the wavelengths, in nanometers, that they emit. According to various websites, a beam at any range between 365 nm and 385 nm can reveal both cat and dog urine. A beam with longer wavelengths, between 390 nm and 400 nm, can detect only dog urine, and then only in a very dark room. Working in a dark room is always best, although some flashlight manufacturers say their beams are strong enough to work even when a room has some light.

Advice on whether you need UV-filtering glasses to avoid eye damage while using the flashlights is mixed, so it’s wise to also invest in a pair of eyeglasses that filter out these wavelengths. The website of Urine Eradication Systems, which makes the PeeDar2 flashlight (about $20 on Amazon), has a good overview of what to look for in selecting glasses. Never shine the beam into your eyes, and make sure the flashlight isn’t where children could get it.

Scanning the floor and lower walls and woodwork with a UV light should make areas where there is dried pee glow bright yellow. Proteins and phosphorus in the urine fluoresce — meaning they absorb one color of light and emit a different color — when exposed to the short wavelengths in the UV range. The light may also pick up spilled food or remnants of cleaning products, which may glow in different colors.

When you find places that glow yellow, outline the area with chalk or painter’s tape, or use sticky notes to cover the area. Then, after you turn the lights back on, treat each area you marked with an enzyme cleaner, such as Nature’s Miracle Dog Stain & Odor Remover (lists for about $25 a gallon on Amazon). Enzyme cleaners break down urine deposits and are far more effective in removing urine smells than general household detergents. If the product has separate instructions for dealing with stains or odors, follow instructions for odor control. The Nature’s Miracle cleaner, for example, recommends combating odors by saturating an area and letting the enzyme air-dry, rather than blotting up any excess after 15 minutes, as it recommends for stain removal.

Manufacturers of UV flashlights caution that fluorescence happens only when urine is dry. “Dry urine has a much more crystalline structure which is able to provide the greatest glows possible,” according to a blog post on the PeeDar website. When UV doesn’t illuminate old urine deposits, the culprit can be high humidity, perhaps from showers. So doing the scan before you move in is ideal.

Weak batteries can also make a UV light ineffective. And a UV scan can also fail to detect urine that was absorbed deep into a surface, such as the carpet pad and flooring under a carpet once the carpet itself has been cleaned. To see the glow, you’d need to peel back the carpet and pad and shine the light on both the pad and the flooring. It’s not always possible to remove all of the smell from wood that has been soaked with urine. In that case, coating the subfloor with a stain-and-odor-blocking sealer is the best option short of ripping out the wood and starting over.

With a concrete floor, using an enzyme cleaner is usually very effective if the concrete was sealed. Removing smells from unsealed concrete can be more challenging, especially in basements, where humidity tends to be high. Retreating the concrete and keeping humidity low can help. But a concrete floor that has radiant heating should stay dry, and it is very likely to be sealed, so you may be able to get rid of the smell altogether.

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