How do I know if there is pet urine in my carpet?
Urine deposits fluoresce under a blacklight in a darkened room, showing a map of what has soaked through the carpet into the pad. Daylight inspection misses most of it, because the visible surface stain is usually far smaller than the deposit underneath and older deposits often show no surface mark at all.
Why you cannot see it in daylight
When an accident happens the liquid spreads outward and downward. What you see on the surface is the smallest part of it. The deposit in the pad underneath is typically much wider, and it can travel along the backing before soaking down.
Older deposits frequently leave no visible surface mark at all while remaining fully active underneath. That is the case that costs people the most, because there is nothing to prompt them to deal with it.
The blacklight
A UV light in a darkened room causes the residue to fluoresce. What appears is a map: how many deposits, how large, and where the heavy concentrations are.
Homeowners are regularly surprised by it, and it is not a comment on housekeeping. It is a comment on how little of a urine deposit is visible at the surface.
It is also worth owning one yourself. A cheap UV torch lets you find a spot in week one instead of year three, which is the difference between a carpet problem and a subfloor problem.
The other signs
Odour that intensifies with humidity, or when the house has been closed up. A pet returning repeatedly to the same area — animals scent-mark where a deposit already exists. Carpet that feels stiff or crunchy in one spot. Discolouration that reappears a day after cleaning, which indicates wicking from below.
Why it changes the quote
Treating urine you have not located is guesswork. A blacklight inspection before quoting determines how much of the floor actually needs sub-surface work rather than a normal clean, which usually means a more accurate and often smaller scope than assuming the whole room.
It is also why the inspection comes before any water goes down. Clean the room first and you dilute and spread the very thing you are trying to find, while reactivating dormant crystals doing it.
What the treatment is, and what it is not
Where the light shows contamination, enzyme solution is flooded in at enough volume to reach the depth the urine reached — down into the pad — and then drawn back out until the recovery water runs clear, and the enzymes are given time to digest what remains.
That is an attempt to remove as much of the deposit as can be reached without opening the floor. We never guarantee a result on pet urine. The complete fix is replacing the pad and sealing the subfloor, which is construction work: Spiker does not pull carpet, does not replace padding, and does not seal subfloors.
The follow-up
questions.
An ordinary UV torch used in a fully darkened room. Dried urine fluoresces; you are looking for irregular pale patches, usually much larger than any stain visible in daylight. Check the baseboards and the wall bases as well as the floor.
Dried urine crystallises, and those crystals release odour when humidity rises. Deodorisers do nothing to crystals — they have to be dissolved and physically extracted.
No, and this is the advice most companies will not give you. Sealing a subfloor while the same animals keep marking the same floor is money spent for nothing. A flood and flush is the right call until the source is fixed, because it buys you time.
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