July 2008

In recent years there has been sort of an explosion in dogie day care and up-scale overnight stay facilities for both dogs and cats. With prices running the gambit, and facilities offering inside play area with padded floors,  outside play area with grass, concrete, AstroTurf,  one on one walks and play times, training, and who know what else. In my area, day care (where you drop your dog off in the morning and pick it up in the evening) starts at $5 and goes up to $35 per day which is cheep based on national averages.

Most of these facilities appear to be clean and well kept, but there are some things you as a pet owner should know about pet facility management. They all seem to:

1. be concerned about their facility looking clean.
2. be very concerned about their facility not smelling like urine or feces.
3. be concerned about bacteria accumulation and how to control it.
4. be concerned about grassy or AstroTurf areas and the build up of waste and dirt

Theses and other concerns are all valid and require serious consideration by you as a pet owner and the facility manager.  However, when questioned about these issues, you will almost always find the facilities personal have been carefully coached on exactly what to say and what not to say and what not to respond to at all.

An an example, when asked what procedure is used to sanitize the play areas you will get an answer that almost always includes chlorine bleach and detergent. If these products are used while the animals are present, you should consider the following. Decomposing (evaporating)  urine releases small amounts of ammonia gas. You may remember your high school science teacher mentioning that when you mix even small amounts of ammonia and chlorine bleach pure chlorine gas (which is deadly poison in even very small quantities) is released. The facilities workers can react to the odor of chlorine gas after once burning their nose and throat, but the dogs and cats are not quite so lucky.

The bottom line is that bleach is a really poor disinfectant (though the pure chlorine gas is pretty good except for the poison aspect). Detergent will dissolve the dirt, feces, and decomposing urine so that it can be easily rinsed away except for the urine that has soaked into the concrete, padding and AstroTurf.

So, how can you protect your pet from the unseen dangers at these facilities. It is pretty tough. Looking for a nice home care business where there are only 4 to 10 dogs is probably your best bet, but you need to monitor their performance very closely as well.

You might want to recomment that you daycare manager check this web site
to find products that will not endanger their employees or charges.

Mold, mildew, musty odors are all from the same source and can be very difficult to eliminate with normal over the counter products. People use bleach, ammonia, detergent, paint, sealers, and a bunch of other stuff that is messy, hard to use, and normally ineffective. Most people who think or knot they have mold are willing to try almost any concoction of cleaners and chemicals to eliminate mold. After all, just having a mold test done (just to see it mold is really the problem) can cost for $200 to $600 depending on were you live and who you have do the work.

The really down side is that if the test is positive (you actually have mold) in many states you have to disclose the contents of the test to any perspective buyer of the property. Even if you have payed the big bucks to have the mold remediation and it was 100% successful, the disclosure is still required and can cost you 10s of thousands of dollars at the closing table.

Until recently, if you had mold in your home and you were serious about removing it,  you were limited to contracting with the guys in the HAZMAT suits and paying thousands of dollars for their services. In addition, disposing of any mold infected clothing, books, papers, toys, furniture etc, was mandatory.  Just the throw away costs could run into the thousands of dollars worth of antiques, documents, books furniture and family heirlooms. Often, the chemicals used to kill the mold were nearly as bad as the mold itself.

Well treating mold has changed for the better. OdorXit has taken a very old chemical technology and combined it with new packaging materials to produce a product that will produce a gas called chlorine dioxide (ClO₂). This gas in  high concentrations (above 10 part per million or .00001% in air) is pretty nasty stuff, but in the concentrations that are produced by the product we call OdorXit® ClO₂ slow release, it is both safe and effective at killing mold, mold spores, tobacco smoke, fire smoke, cooking smoke, bacteria and viruses.

OdorXit® ClO₂ is provided in 5, 10, 25, and 50 gram packets that are designed to safely treat areas as small as a closet or bathroom to a 4000 square foot storage facility. There are 2 minor requirements; there must be at least 40% humidity in the area of treatment (or you have to add a tiny amount of water to the packet) and you need to have a low speed fan to stir the are in the area being treated to circulate the ClO₂ to all the places that need treating. The treatment time varies from a few hours to a week, but when complete, the mold is dead and so are the mold spores.

So if you are having a problem with mold there is now a really effective solution that does not cost thousands of dollars to implement and cause all sorts of problems down the road.

OdorXit® is the registered trade mark of Listening Systems Inc