How do you get a bad smell out of a car

I spilled milk in my car last week and I thought I cleaned it all out with a towel. Apparently I was wrong and the odor is pretty pungent now. I have used a steamvac on the floor and the floorpad to clean it out so far, as well as using ammonia and water. I used it on the floorpad yesterday and it seems (i kept the floorpad in the bed of the truck) to have lost its odor when I sniffed it today. I just cleaned the floor out today with the steamvac and i’m hoping that’ll take care of the odor. If it doesn’t what are my other options for this kind of thing? Is there a special cleaner designed for organic molecules that is anti-bacterial that I can use? I remember an episode of mythbusters where the smell of decaying organic matter was so intense people had to sell their cars but that was after months. I hope that doesn’t happen to me.

I suggest Ozium. You can find it in any autoparts store, or the automotive section of Walmart. I suggest the Original scent.

Can you just replace the floormats? If that’s where most of the milk spilled it’s a cheap, quick fix.

Scrub all the parts where the milk spilled with water and abundant amounts of Bicarbonate of Soda.

Bad news – hope you weren’t really attached to that car. My family’s car had milk spilled in the trunk when I was young. We did everything – including taking the carpet out and sending it to a rug cleaner – and 6 years later, whenever it rained, the smell of sour milk came from the trunk. Evil.

That said, there are some enzymatic cleansers out on the market now that might be worth a try. I usually find them in pet stores, but you can sometimes find non-pet specific versions in drugstores.

Maybe get some Acidophilous capsules, break them up into some warm water, and spray that on the carpet – don’t know what that will do, but it sounds like an interesting plan.

Doesn’t that just help because its a base and most odors are acidic? I technically tried then when I used ammonia on the rug (ammonia has a pH of 10), it didn’t work.

Now that i’ve steamvac’d it it doesn’t smell as bad but it still smells. Maybe after 10+ more cleanings it won’t smell as bad.

I put the floorpad in the bed to test to see if the odor was just due to the floorpad or if it was in the cab. It is in the cab and the floorpad doesn’t really smell from what I can tell. Odd. Maybe its just my steamvac because after I cleaned the floorpad the first time the dirty water smelled horrible but after I cleaned the floor of the cab (using the vacuum attachment, which may have crappy suction, I don’t know) the water I threw out didn’t really smell bad.

Boy I sure hope you mean the bed of a truck, not YOUR bed :smiley:

Can you leave doors/windows open and let it air out as much as possible? Maybe use a fan to keep air moving. Perhaps sprinkle some absorbent on the floorboards (kitty litter, sawdust, baking soda) and shopvac it out.

I’d still ditch the floormats. A new set is about $20 at the autoparts store and if there’s any remnants of spoiled milk in them it’ll be hard to get out and there’s a lot of surface area for stuff to grow and fester.

I know that there are absorbents meant to handle some pretty rank smells (we’re talking the stuff that is used to clean up after dead bodies, etc). I did a little googling and the only hint I saw was “soak white bread in vinegar and then put it out to soak up the smell”, no idea if that’s worth trying.

Its only on the passenger side though, not the drivers side. The problem is I took the floormats on the passenger side out for a day to test to see if the smell was just coming from the floormats (I assumed if so then the smell would go away). Since the smell was/is still in the cab its not just the floormats, so getting new floormats won’t fix it. If anything it might just ruin those too. I don’t think its the floormat though, like I said when I used the steamvac on the floormat the dirty water smelled horrible and now the floormat doesn’t seem to smell as bad. I can even sniff it up close and not really get any scent of spoiled milk.

I put down another layer of ammonia to see if that’ll help and left the window open some to circulate the air. Tomorrow i’ll put some Ozium in to see if that works.

How much acidic odor can these bacteria make? Lucky me it wasn’t even regular milk, it was a workout shake with 16oz milk, 50g protein powder and 50g sugar. So now the bacteria have amino acids and tons of sugar to eat as well as just the milk.

What about Nok out?

http://www.nokout.com/Nok-Out_faqs.html

(Q) How does Nok-Out work?

(A) Nok-Out converts odors by oxidation to a substance that has no odor. For best effects, Nok-Out must get to the source of the odor, meaning that it should come into direct contact with the odor source (the bad smell!)

A fogger might work:

http://www.topoftheline.com/comodwipsys.html

Bad news. My family ended up selling two cars due to this problem–once when I was little and spilled my milk, and once when my uncle gave his kids milk in our car without permission and one of them spilled it and didn’t tell anybody. We tried everything, but nothing could cover up or remove the awful, horrible stench of spoiled milk. Based on what I’ve seen, that shit’s never coming out, unless you want to pay to have the car completely reupholstered.

Who’d want to buy a car that smells like spoiled milk?

We left a couple of pounds of turkey sausage in the trunk once … in 80 degree weather … and the car sat for 3 days before we discovered the problem :eek: :eek:

We shampooed the carpets repeatedly. When it dried we dumped a box of Arm and Hammer on the carpet Then we dumped a bag of charcoal briquets to help absorb the odor. We used an entire bottle of vanilla scented essential oil soaked cotton balls placed all over the interior of the car, including the intake air conditioner vents. We replaced all of the above twice, a few weeks apart.

That car still smelled funky whenever the temperature was over 75 degrees, which is 3/4 of the year in the deep south where I live. We traded the car in and bought a new one.

I hope you have better luck than we did!

My dog once drank a grande mocha latte and barfed it up (fortunately for the dog) in my husband’s truck. We have a home carpet shampoo’er,so we used “odo-ban” in the shampoo water, and it helped. Eventually the smell did wear out, though.

LisaRx

As I recall, they were both traded in for new cars. I don’t really know what the deal was, but it seems to have worked in both cases. Keeping in mind that in the latter case my parents could probably have ditched the car and bought a new one without too much financial distress anyway–as I recall, you’re a student, so this probably isn’t an option for you. (And it wouldn’t be for me, either…which is why I’m super observant about what people drink in my car. Luckily, I got to learn my lesson on someone else’s car.)

Best of luck getting the smell out. I remember how gag-inducing it could be.

I just put down a layer of coffee grounds since I’ve heard this will work.

If I have to pull up the carpet how do I do that? Are there tons of screws involved in doing this?

Sell it in the winter? Or like that episode of “All Creatures Great And Small” (with the farting dog), find a buyer with no sense of smell…

While looking info up online I came across a few sites that say coffee grounds work to fix the smell of rotten milk. So I put a thin layer of coffee grounds down on the floor of the passenger side (where the milk spilled) and the smell seems to be gone. When I open the door there is no pungent odor of milk. The smell of coffee is there but its not super strong. And I don’t think the coffee is just covering up the smell of the milk because when I put ammonia in there I could smell both the ammonia and the milk, now I can only seem to smell to coffee. If the coffee was just ‘overpowering’ the milk I’d smell them both but I don’t think I do.

So hopefully this will work. In a couple of days I’ll clean this layer and set down a new layer, then another layer of coffee grounds a few days after that. After that maybe i’ll keep an open container of coffee in my car to absorb whatever is left. That is assuming that this solution continues to work and isn’t a fluke or something.

I had a dead dog in my Jeep that created a major problem. I ended up trading the Jeep in on a new one. The odor was about 20% the reason behind the trade. Here is the thread I started :

If anyone cares or has this problem themselves I will keep updates for a week or two on how the coffee grounds are working. But I have noticed that the smell seems to be gone even though they’ve only been in there for about 16 hours. its not like the smell is ‘overpowered’ by the coffee either, it seems to not be there (at least not as much) because the coffee isn’t strong enough to block out the smell of the milk.

Normally when i’d open the car door after having the doors shut and the windows closed for several hours the smell would be really strong, now the smell isn’t really there. But only time will tell how well this will work.