How to Eliminate Dog Urine Odour from Artificial Grass

The whole point of artificial grass is to allow you and your pets to be able to enjoy your garden. Reducing the effort and headache that comes with real grass.

So, it’s not surprising that your happy thought bubble soon burst because your lawn proved to come with its very own problem. The foul smell of dog urine odour.

Whenever you go into your garden, you’re now greeted with the unpleasant smell of dog urine. Oozing from deep within the turf. Needless to say, you aren’t staying in the garden for long.

You installed synthetic grass to solve real grass problems. Considering how expensive it can be, it shouldn’t be causing dog owners OTHER problems. And it really doesn’t have to. There actually is an effective way to stop and prevent your artificial grass from smelling.

Why does your artificial grass smells of dog pee?

Before diving into how to get rid of the smell of urine, it’s best to understand why your turf smells like a urinal. Because let’s face it, that’s where things are headed if you don’t do something about it.

The bizarre thing about artificial grass is that it’s actually designed to have better drainage than natural grass.

So in theory, dog pee shouldn’t be a problem. However, when your dogs regularly use the lawn as their designated restroom, the urine builds up within the layers of the artificial grass. This causes a build-up of the organics that cause the nasty smells.

Your synthetic turf installation and maintenance

There are two big reasons artificial turf sometimes retains the smell of dog wee. A combination of badly installed artificial grass and a lack of regular maintenance. With more emphasis on the lack of regular maintenance.

If your lawn was badly installed beneath the surface, then it means it wasn’t made permeable enough. Meaning it won’t allow enough drainage for liquids, including pet urine, to pass through and out of it. But even if it was installed well, excess urine traces will still buildup within the membrane. Particularly during periods of low rainfall in both summer and winter.

Nonetheless, how the grass was installed is out of your control. Which brings us onto the importance of maintenance.

While badly installed artificial turf might be out of your control, it’s even more reason to make more of an effort to prevent the lingering odours of dog wee with a little maintenance.

Unfortunately, when we say maintenance, rinsing your artificial grass down with a garden hose or warm water isn’t going to cut it to prevent the smell of dog urine from artificial grass. You’re actually just moving the organics around, rather than getting rid of them.

Why can’t pet urine smells simply be washed away from artificial turf?

Pet urine is actually made up of 95% water. The other 5% however, is composed of urea, uric acid and ammonia. This is where the real source of the problematic pet urine odours come from. Along with other waste product materials such as proteins, salts, minerals and toxins.

The only thing you need to understand, however, is the uric acid part.

Uric acid is made up of many microscopic salt-like crystals that don’t naturally decompose or dissolve by themselves. This is why you will find that when your dog pees on your astroturf, the bad smells can go on throughout the whole of summer unless you do something about it.

These uric acid crystals embed themselves within the various layers of artificial lawn your dog’s urine has saturated and stay there, reacting to environmental factors that worsen (high temperatures and humidity) or lessen their smell (cold weather and heavy rainfall).