Odor Removal in Port Washington, Wisconsin

From our shop

About 40 minutes

Price

Quoted

Common source

Fish, bait, cooler leaks

First step

Find the source

Why fish smell does not fade on its own

Most organic odors peak and then slowly decline as the material breaks down and dries out. Fish protein does not behave that way, because the compounds responsible for the smell — trimethylamine chiefly — are produced continuously as the protein degrades, and the degradation is slow.

So a cooler that leaked into a boot carpet in July is not a memory by October. It is an active source that has been producing smell for three months and will keep going. The material has to be physically removed; waiting does not work and neither does anything applied to the air.

Where it ends up on a charter vehicle

Coolers are the usual route. A cooler with catch or bait that sat in a boot and leaked, even slightly, puts fish liquid into the carpet backing and from there into the spare wheel well below the load floor, where it has nowhere to drain and nobody looks.

We lift the load floor on every Port Washington vehicle. It is the source far more often than the carpet above it, and a vehicle where the carpet has been cleaned twice and still smells is almost always a spare well problem.

Truck beds are their own case. Bed liners trap liquid underneath, and a spray-in liner that has had fish liquid sit on it in sun absorbs it into the surface. Rope, nets and waders in a cab bring it onto seats and carpet on the way home.

Bait is worse than catch

Bait — alewife, smelt, cut bait — is smaller, more fragile, and more likely to leak, and it is stored in the same coolers and buckets that go in the same boot. Spilled bait liquid in carpet is the hardest fish odor we see, and it is the one where honest expectation-setting matters most.

Caught within a day or two and extracted properly: usually resolved. Left through a warm month in a closed boot, into the foam under the carpet: substantial improvement is normal, complete elimination is not guaranteed, and occasionally the honest answer is replacing a carpet section rather than cleaning it. We will tell you which case you have after we have seen it, not before.