Ok so just ignore everyting anyone else has said. Ive delt ewith this prolem many times. I spent several years working in the car upholstery business so ive been there and done that. First off the smell is only going to get worse, avoid parking it in the sun. secondly the only way to get rid of the milk and its smell is probably going to have to be done by a professional. Your not going to need to buy anything new but its a lot of labor. the seats the milk spilled in are going to need to be removed and disassembled completely. taking of the covers to expose the foam. THen the foam is going to need to be soaked with water, drained and dried. If its in any of the carpet then that is going to have to be taken out hve the jute stripped from it and then washed with liquid laundry detergent. then when its dried new jute will be installed and the seat will be put back together. But your not out of the wood yet. Chances are that the smell will still be there, but not at bad. So the car will need to be deodorized. its a long process and worth it cause its just going to get worse and if your keep pouring water on it youll end up doing more harm to your vehicles upholstery and eventually need to repace everything with new. Best of luck.
Febreze was able to get a stubborn pet odor out of my car’s upholstery in just one application. I soaked the affected area thoroughly and let it air dry.
Prior to using Febreze I had tried other products marketed for pet stain and odor removal but these seemed to just mask the odor for a short period of time. I did not try Nature’s Miracle since I was not aware of the product.
Hi, Guys
Love your column. Regarding the sour milk stink, I have a suggestion. It is a long shot that I do not have a clue as to whether it will work. However, there are some stinks that plain old vinegar works well on. I have used it on pet urine on carpet. Spilled milk, however, would be new one on me.
Robert Harris
Spray vinegar on wherever the milk was spilled. May have to do it a few times. Then, there’s the vinegar smell which might be almost a bad. I sprayed windex on that vinegar smell a few times which worked, and I have not smelled anything rancid since.
Several years ago I left approx. 50 lbs. of frozen beef (daddy had a farm) in the trunk of my new car for a couple of days…it was nasty. I forgot about it…After cleaning the blood up, using carpet cleaner, oh did I mention it was during the summer in Arkansas? The smell was really bad. I had gone to Sam’s for my mother and bought dryer sheets for her (no Sam’s where she lived), when I got in my car after work it smelled so good…guess the humidity and whatever was in the dyer sheets worked together. I really didn’t care…the smell was gone.
There is a product called Odormute (normally sold in pet stores) which may work. It is an enzyme sold to remove pet smells and even skunk smells! I cannot testify to the skunk part, but it definitely works on the pet part!
Cheryl T.
I had a gallon of milk pop open in my trunk and nothing would get rid of it. We told the store manager what happened and he hired a company, at their expense, to clean it. They came to our house and used some type of enzyme cleaner and it was just like new. Not a whiff of odor. I think it was around $50 and I would have gladly paid it myself for the convenience.
Hey Robert: I think I have the perfect solution for you. We spilled a gallon of milk in our car (in the summer!), and decided that the way to get the smell out, was to leave the windows open to air it out. We drove to a trailhead and went for a 6 hour hike to a remote lake. When we came back, we realized we had had a visitor who was more than willing to tear the inside of our car apart for us, which saved us a huge amount of work. A bear had gotten inside the car, and left us with his digested contribution causing a new odor that we hadn’t had before. All of a sudden, sour milk didn’t smell so bad to us. If I remember rightly, we drove all summer and into the next winter with our windows open; so guess I have only solved one of your problems. We had help with the dismantling of our car, but even after repairing it, we were left with a stench that sent several questioning glances our way.
Evelyn
ZORBX You can get it at Lowes.
Funny you should ask… about three weeks ago, as I was unloading three one-gallon bottles of non-fat milk, I noticed one of them had unloaded about a cup of its contents on the rug in the back of my quad-cab Toyota pickup. Dried it up as best I could, next day it stant to the heavens. Anyways, gt out my trusty wet-vac and the garden hose, thoroughly wetted the offending area, let sit for a half hour, vacuumed out the liquid, then repeadted with a 50% mix of water and drug-store hydrogen peroxide (which is 3% to begin with… don’t use higher concentration, unless you want to risk a really nice white spot on your carpet). Once that was vacuumed up (I am a mechanical engineer, so I subscribe to the maxim "when in doubt, go stout)I emptied and set up the wet-vac again, with the nozzle squarely against the carpet just adjacent to the subject area, and slowly dribbled the hose on the offended area (so the water kept flowing through the carpet sideways. Feeling pretty smug, I left the windows open on a nice warm day for about 3 hours, then closed up the car for the night. Next morning I opened the car and WHOAH!(my son asked me what had died in the car), so I drove with my windows open, and left it that way for the rest of the day. To my amazement, the smell was gone, and did not return.
BTW… The thing with the hose went on for about 15 minutes (until the 5-gal wet-vac filled up). If I had been a civil engineer, I would have done it four times as long…
I have a friend that spilled chilli in the seat of her car. She sprayed the seat with Febreze and it did not work. They told her at the Saturn place to pour Febreze on the seat and let it evaporate. She did and no more smell. This method may work on your carpet.
Okay, I’ll be number 3 to STRONGLY recommend NATURE’s MIRACLE. It WILL do the job. My 3-year old spilt a bottle of milk this summer, and it didn’t take too long in the North Carolina sun for the car to reek. I’ve had cats over the years and had some of this around the house… gave it a try and it solved our problem.
Just soak the affected area with it, and let it go to work. The smell will linger until NM completely dries, so be patient. It worked wonders!
If you can’t find it in a local store, try to reach the company at: Pets 'N People, Inc., 27520 Hawthoren Blvd, Suite 125, Rolling Hills Estates, CA 90274
A recent similar situation with milk reminded me of the nautical saying “spill the milk, sell the boat”. After much research, I settled on a product called OdorXit. web site “http://www.odorxit.com/”. This product lived up to all of the claims on the web site. Let me preface this by saying that this fix took a long time, much work and mechanical ability. I spilled the milk on the front seat of my GMC extended cab Sonoma. The milk soaked the seat cushion and pooled in the carpet on the entire passenger side of the truck. I removed and dismantled the front seat to expose the foam cushions. Soaking the cushions and fabric with water washed out most of the milk. Then using the above product mixed according to the directions, I soaked the fabric and foam and let them dry. With the carpet, I used water to completely saturate the carpet, basically filling the floor pan with water, letting it run out the drains, and repeating the process. The final step was to saturate the carpet, etc. with the product and lit it dry. Reassembling the truck after it was dry, I have not had any additional odors reappear.
Dear Tom and Ray,
When reading about Robert’s sour milk smell problem in his vovlo may I suguest to him to use this product i use in my home and now sell as it has taken all orders out of my house and has taken me off allergy medicine. this company makes a unit for cars also. We offer a FREE 3 DAY TRIAL. contact me at marierodriguez1771@yahoo.com LOOK FORWARD TO HELPING ROBERT AND OTHERS WITH THIS TYPE OF PROBLEM. We also sell other products,laundry,suppluments,facial,coffee,etc.
I can also put you in touch with my managers whom have been in the business for years. This product is manufactured in the GOOD OLD USA!!!
That is another thing i LOVE about this product!!! And it WORKS!!!
sicerely Mrs. Rodriguez
I don’t know if this will work or not, having never tried it on milk, but we’ve had good luck cleaning skunk spray off our dog. Use a mixture a quart of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide, a quarter cup of baking soda, and a teaspoon of liquid soap. This mixture generates a lot of excess oxygen, which reacts with the organic odiferous material and breaks it down. It should work with milk if it works with skunk!
— Spence
Use the natural mineral powder Multi Sorb available from Montana Mineral Products Co. (406-825-3570). Multi Sorb is a deodorizing absorbent and has been used repeatedly to save expensive autos with similar problems.
We bought a house where they pulled 80 live cats from a year before we bought it and we pulled 23 dead ones from. The smell was absolutely the worst thing!! One of our neighbors passed along the hint of using a product called “Liquid Alive”. This stuff smells like a hundred people brushed their teeth and spit it on the floor, but it really works, if you use it right. It’s an enzyme that eats the bacteria that causes the odor. We had renters in the house, and until the neighbors told them that they lived in the “cat house”, they had no idea.
I spilled potatoe soup in my husband truck. We tried many things, but the only thing that worked was Sportsmans Scent Away. It is made to remove human oder for hunters. I only used it once, but a couple applications may be needed. And you can buy this almost anywhere.
In the '70’s when I was a mechanic then a corporate fleet manager I delt with 2 cars with this problem.
-
A customer’s 6 month old station wagon with a rancid odor which the dealer could nut correct. We locked our guard dog in the car and observed where he backed away from. We started pulling off pannels and found a limberger cheese sandwich(dropped there by an assemblyline worked).We reassembled the pannels and sent the car to an interior shop.
-
As a fleet manager I was asked to handle a car in which a vice president’s son had spilled milk and left other food items. I could not drive the car without all windows open and the blower on full blast. This car also went to the interior shop.
This shop used an interior deodorizing device that worked by placing 2 large hoses in opposing windows, sealing the interior, and pumping (unknown to me)deodorizing chemicals thru the vehicle and leaving the device running until the odor was gone.
In both cases it took almost 50 hours but the odors were perminately eliminated.
In the case of the new car,the customer’s dealer reimbursed the cost and asked for the location of the interior shop for his own future use. Although I don’t recall the actual cost, it was very reasonable.
Dean