How to get dog pee smell out of artificial grass with an enzyme cleaner

Fresh urine is mostly water and urea. It drains through the blades in seconds and dries in the sand infill and on the backing. Bacteria there break the urea down and give off ammonia, which is the smell, and every damp morning restarts them. An enzyme cleaner contains proteins that break urea, uric acid and the protein residue into pieces the bacteria cannot use, so the smell stops because the food is gone. The problem page covers the why in more depth; this page is the how.

• An enzyme cleaner labeled for pet turf or artificial grass. Buy the concentrate; a ready-to-use bottle covers a doormat.
• A two-gallon pump sprayer, or a hose-end sprayer if the product is made for one.
• A hose with a shower or fan nozzle.
• An evening. Enzymes are proteins; sun and heat dry them out and denature them before they have done anything.

1. Pick up solids and blow the zone clear.
2. Flush. Hose on a shower setting, aimed down through the turf, about five minutes per hundred square feet, until the runoff at the low edge runs clear. This moves loose residue down and out and wets the infill so the enzyme can spread through it.
3. Let it drain ten or fifteen minutes. You want damp, not standing water; a flooded infill dilutes the product.
4. Mix at the label ratio for heavy soiling.
5. Apply to saturation. The target is the infill, not the blades. Roughly a gallon of mixed solution per fifty to a hundred square feet; part the fibers with your fingers afterward and the sand should be wet.
6. Dwell. Twenty minutes minimum. Overnight is better, which is why you started in the evening. If it begins to dry, mist it with the hose.
7. Do not rinse unless the label says to. Most turf enzymes are left to finish working. A light rinse the next morning is fine if you prefer.
8. Repeat weekly for three weeks on a zone that has smelled for months. One round handles a spot from last week; a year of buildup takes three.

• Spraying the blades. Looks like coverage, reaches nothing. The residue is an inch down.
• Afternoon application. On a July afternoon the turf surface is well over a hundred degrees and the product is dry in minutes. Evening or early morning only.
• Sanitizer first. Quat or peroxide sanitizers kill the enzyme along with the bacteria. Enzyme first, sanitizer days later if you want it.
• Mixing with vinegar. The acid denatures the enzyme. Separate jobs, separate days.
• Treating only the favorite spot. Dogs use the corner most and the rest of the zone some. Treat the whole zone.
• Expecting a spray bottle to do it. A twelve-ounce trigger bottle covers about a square yard properly.

Go out early on a humid morning a week after the third round, before the sun has been on the yard. Kneel and smell the turf from a foot away in the worst spot. Nothing, or faint and gone by the time you stand, is a win; keep up the daily routine and it stays that way. Still sharp, and the infill looks dark or feels crusted when you part the fibers, means the residue load is bigger than the enzymes can digest. That infill is saturated, and no product poured on top will fix it.

Saturated infill in the pet zone gets extracted and replaced, ideally with an odor-control infill made for dogs, and the rest of the yard gets the flush, enzyme and antimicrobial in the right order with equipment that moves more water than a hose. That is our pet odor removal, part of a Premium Restoration from $299 for up to 500 square feet and $399 for up to 1,000, with a heavy-odor add-on of $75 to $150 for bad zones and new infill at $0.75 to $1.50 per square foot where it is needed. The flushing page covers the rinse technique in more detail.