Greg In The Desert

My poor cat Saturn started peeing on things while I was traveling. At first I thought it was behavioral and that she was trying to tell me something (like stop leaving me). It turns out she had a urinary tract infection.

One of the clues that it wasn’t behavior related is that even though she peed on my bed, she peed a lot. It was like someone pour a gallon of water on my bed. She also wasn’t peeing in her litter box.

It makes it easier that I had several layers of blankets and sheets on my bed and a layer of foam. Not much leaked onto the mattress.

I have a front loading high capacity washing machine. Normally I would load up to capacity with clothes then use a standard detergent. This was done initially with the blankets from the bed and urine could still be detected by the human nose.

After consulting with Google, I put the peed on blankets in one at a time. I then put it on a rinse cycle and filled the detergent, softener and bleach reservoirs with standard 5% acidity vinegar. If I would have had stronger 20% vinegar I would have used it.

I’m not sure if the vinegar was necessary, the next step may have been enough. But vinegar is good for the washing machine, it removes soap residue and calcium from hard water and should be used regularly in any case.

The next thing I did was to use a normal wash cycle with warm/cold water and mostly Oxi Clean with a little normal detergent. Oxi Clean contains sodium percarbonate which includes hydrogen peroxide and is often recommended to clean urine. I used as much Oxi Clean as I could fit in the reservoirs and I think it was the most effective ingredient in the process.

Haven’t tested it without the vinegar and hope I never have to.

None of the blankets, sheets or foam padding have any smell of cat urine and a black light scan shows no evidence of cat urine. For the mattress, I used an enzyme based cleaner. My cat Saturn has not tired to remark her scent or scratch at the area (trying to cover up) where she peed before. I’m calling it a success.

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