Removing Smells from Car Interiors -- OdourKill

You have a smell in your car. It might bother you, or it might be your partner who refuses to get in. Either way, spraying an air freshener around is not going to fix it -- at best it masks the surface for a few days and the smell comes back. The source has to be found and extracted.

Gary breaks it down into four types, and the treatment depends entirely on which one you are dealing with.

Spillages

Milk is the most common. Sometimes you bought the car and you did not even know something had been spilled -- the previous owner cleaned the surface, the smell developed later, and now you cannot find it. We extract the contamination; depending on where it is, a seat may need to come out to get to the source properly. If we clean the obvious area and the smell becomes more apparent elsewhere -- which happens -- we assess what else is in the car and work up from there.

We had a fish spillage from a business owner once: cleaned the obvious area, and two more spillages revealed themselves as the first one cleared. The fish smell had been masking them. If a first treatment does not fully resolve it, we find out why.

Smoke

An occasional smoke -- a delivery driver who lit up once, someone who smoked in it twice -- sometimes a good spray treatment clears it. If someone has been smoking in the car for 20,000 or 30,000 miles, that is a different job entirely. The usual pattern: they said they would never smoke in the car, then one wet Monday morning in traffic they lit up and started flicking ash out the window. The ash comes back in. Smoke residue goes on the glass, the headlining, every surface. We have specialist machines that can treat the full interior, but the level of the solution matches the level of the problem. We can assess it when we see it.

Fire and Soot

Cars parked in garages when a house fire starts, small boot fires that got put out but left soot everywhere -- these we usually handle through insurance companies, though not always. Call your insurer first, mention us; a lot of the time they already know us and will send the car straight over.

Damp

A musty, damp smell can be a water leak, a blocked air conditioning drain, or simply someone who left the roof down on a convertible and got caught in the rain. If it is a leak, you need to fix the leak first -- treating the smell without fixing the source just brings it back. We have a water leak finding and repair service if that is the underlying problem.

Some of the More Memorable Jobs

A lady bought a brand new car, went on holiday and left it at the airport for two weeks. She had fish in the boot -- fish guts, to be precise. They had been there the whole time. Gary's measure of how bad it was: she could smell the car from the airport bus, before she had even reached the car park. The smell got stronger with every step towards it. We dealt with it.

A chicken carcass in the boot of another car. Left long enough that by the time it came to us it was full of maggots. The maggots were, as Gary puts it, doing their job. We dealt with that too.

Then there were the prawns. Someone -- Gary is tactful about the family circumstances -- removed the headrests, spent what must have been a solid hour poking whole unpeeled prawns down through the headrest tubes, then replaced them. We cleaned and deodorised the car; the smell came back. It was not until we stripped the seats and found what was in there that the problem became clear. New foam, headrests back on, job done. A second car arrived shortly after with the same treatment, this time in the roof recess of a convertible. Gary's advice to anyone considering it: don't.

Whatever the problem, give us a call and describe it. We can usually help you assess it over the phone before you come in. See our professional car odour removal service.