Dogs pee in the house. It’s an inevitability, despite their willingness to please their human masters. Bladders are small, and days are long. Ergo, dogs pee in the house.
A myriad of devices exist which attempt to deal with this problem. And indeed, the pee can be extracted, but residual proteins remain. And these proteins stink! So, a myriad of products exist which attempt to neutralize them. And…none of them work.
So I was left with a choice: kill the dog and burn the carpet, or live with the smell. Neither seemed ideal. But then I remembered the final invoice I received from our last apartment. In it, a specific deduction was itemized from our deposit: an ozone treatment for the dog smell. Faye had a tendency to pee in the second bedroom.
At the time, I considered this bizarre procedure to be limited to a specialized commercial application, and therefore necessitating expensive equipment. But they say smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory, and when walking down the hallway one day, the stench wafted into my nose and my hippocampus short-circuited.
A quick search through Amazon revealed many affordable products. So, as I normally do, I made a selection based on recommendations and ordered the Enerzen ozone generator.
Excitedly, I unboxed it as soon as it arrived. I concluded that the best place to test it would be the bathroom, since if anything went wrong, the room already had ventilation. I set it for a modest 20 minutes, plugged it in, then immediately ran away as its insides glowed purple. An overreaction, perhaps. But I’ve seen enough post-apocalyptic movies to not be disconcerted at the color (even if it’s oxidation, not radiation).
I returned an hour later, figuring it had been enough time to dissipate. I figured wrong. In fact, it was 2 days before the ozone smell was finally gone. But, the bathroom no longer held that mild mildewy essence.
Unfortunately for Liz, it triggered memories of her numerous hospital visits and she became nauseous. Turns out that they use these to sterilize surgery rooms.
But despite that, it was a preferable alternative to dog pee. I started treating the carpet, cleverly devising a method to trap the ozone under a storage bin so as to avoid flooding the house in painful free radicals:
But as it turns out, an ozone generator can’t keep generating ozone with oxygen (ah hindsight). So the viable output of this method was insufficient to deodorize anything. So now, I’m running it for short bursts in problem areas, which is difficult because I can’t evacuate the house, and too much will kill the houseplants.
So it remains to be seen if this tool is effective, since I have yet to run a proper test. Hopefully the multitude of supporting anecdotes out there will foreshadow my own success. And if not, I can always kill the dog and burn the carpet.
–Simon
