Commercial Treatments for Large areas

There are also a couple of other effective treatments that are available commercially. We keep these on the truck at all times and can come by and spray them in emergencies. I also keep a white suite or two on the truck so that I can do this without contaminating myself too bad and spreading it around the customer’s property. They control the smell in different ways, but are designed to actually eat up the stink and not just cover it up. They turn what would be 2-3 weeks of stinkyness into two or three days. Nice! These products are applicable in different areas. Some can be used in living areas and others cannot. They can be applied by themselves or in addition to the peroxide/baking soda. They give more rapid relief from the smell than other peroxide treatment alone. We can apply odor controllers either by spray bottle or with a fog machine. A spray bottle will only cover a relatively small area and is only used when you know exactly where the skunk “cut loose”. The fog machine creates a much smaller droplet that will drift and reach areas that a spray will not. The fog machine is far superior in my opinion.

Be careful when you clean up! Skunk spray has a way of glomming onto surfaces and is very hard to clean up. It seems to get into your clothes, even if you are just in the area. If it makes contact with your skin or clothes, it will be a while until they smell the same again even with some treatments. It seems to get into your skin and stay there. As a critter guy people half expect me to smell like a skunk. It probably even makes me seem more credible when I show up at their door. Give us a call and we can help you with clean up. Better me than you. Your friends and family may not be that understanding and you could end up as a temporary outcast.

Treatments That Actually Work

A mix of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish detergent works pretty well because they form a chemical reaction and foam vigorously. This needs to be used while they are foaming. Don’t put these into a sealed container like a spray bottle. The gases that this mixture gives off can cause the container to burst. While you are doing this it might be a good idea to wear some special suit or something to keep the stink off your clothes and skin. It only takes a few molecules to stink things up. The down side to this is that it has to be applied directly to the affected area. If the skunk has sprayed some random part of your crawl space this is not going to help you.

After the Clean Up

Now here is the important part. What are you going to do to keep this from happening again? If your dog happened to upset a skunk that is hard to control. But, it may be a good idea to check the foundations of the house. Why??? Because, the hub of the skunk’s activity will center around its den area. If you have a deck or crawlspace that is open, it is very possible that the skunk is under there. Please don’t shrug this off thinking that this is not the case. You wouldn’t believe how many skunk customers don’t know that they have a skunk under the house. Believe it or not, this can go on for years. Only unhappy skunks smell bad.

The odds of your skunk getting sprayed increase if the skunk is denning under your deck or home. Keep this in mind. It is good to have someone who has dealt with this before to check your property. I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at a home and found skunk issues under buildings that the homeowner didn’t even suspect. Give us a call if you need an inspection. If you are having trouble with this I also suggest that you check out our skunk trapping and exclusion pages.

By far the best way to deal with skunk stink is just not to have it at all. Most of my calls involve an animal that has entered the home’s crawlspace - see our page on removing skunks. Preventing this probably means doing some preventative work around the house to make sure that there are no potential entrance holes. This is a good reason to have a yearly inspection. An inspection, more often than not, will turn up entrances into a home that the homeowner will be unaware of. If an entrance is found, we can remove it without a stink in most cases.