Effective odor removal

I cant shake the dead mice/ mice dung smell in my truck. I gutted the interior . Cleaned every crevice I could find, dissasembled the seats, soaked the foam in deodorizer, bleach , pine sol you name it, including the rubber floor mat . Let it air out in the sun for days , yet the stink remains,

Anybody ever use an ozone generator? Supposedly that's what professionals use. Any negative side effects ?

After setting out in the sun yesterday it smelled so bad I couldn't even drive it.

The only thing left in it that's not steel is the seats, the floor mat, and the insulation in the engine compartment .

I'm open to suggestions

Redo the doghouse insulation... probably had more critters living in there than the rest of the van. If the van was infested, you might want to consider getting your seats stripped down.

EVERY nook and cranny? Did you remove the two triangular covers from the bottom of the door pillars behind the front wheelwells? It exposes a gap that reaches all the way to your rocker panels. Might not be a bad idea to make sure your drain holes are clear and then flush out the rocker panels from inside, followed by bleach treatment, followed by rust proofing (? Am I right about this fellow Econoheads? Just pulled this suggestion out of the air, never done it).

Bleach & pinesol in a squirt bottle is great - smell comes from the mice piss!! also after that might put some mothballs in a few places- yes u will smell them for a while but eventually kills the smells & goes away. I also have after cleaningt gotten some of theos smelly things that we used to hang from the rearview mirrors and put them in various locations.

Just put a carp under the seat, you'll stop worrying about the mice in a few days.

Other than that I got nothing

With the seats and mat removed,does the van still smell? Locate the exact source first. Make sure the smeall is in the van and not coming from inside the doghouse area,exhaust pipe,or somewhere underneath. You gotta locate it to deal with it. Its common to find mice nest above the head liner,in the heater hoses,in the seats,battery box,glove box,tranny bell housing,behind the front nose insulation blanket,and anywhere else that may be safe and cozy. Another spot is in the roof rails or where the wire harness runs or anywhere around the roof edges. Those little dudes get everywhere.

i used those bombs , furnace guys use, also go to a pro cleaning supply co. and get a gallon of emzine oder eater, took out cat piss smell, may work.

That Febreeze stuff actually works pretty good on fabric to, worked on skunk in my favorite recliner anyway, Stupid dog.

mice are wacked

I'm a cleaner by trade and the Febreeze stuff is OK if using it once get rid of the smell , but too much will make what ever your using it on turn to a dirt magnet. To fix your problem you must find the source of the odor. There something you must have missed. Once you clean out the source a ozone machine will remove the air bound odors

What about the airbox in the nose for the heater and vents ?

Carp?/ Thats a good one !! Years back - when most all cars ran hubcaps= for the wedding partys car we would put bait=shrimp in the hubcaps= wont smell for a few days & it never makes any noise!! Really bad in a few days & so hard to locate!! hehe=

Thanks guys, I stripped it again yesterday...trying to follow my nose and investigate further..

Backpeddeling to when I got it last year I removed the headler and was showered with mice turds and a couple of dead ones.. I removed nesting materials from behind the seats in a crevice under the window (hard to explain but if you have an econo truck then you know where this is)..I also removed and trashed the insulating panel that goes behind the headlights..I had removed the heater housing assembly and removed the heater core..

Yesterday I removed the seats again...they don't smell good at all..so off to the upholster for a rebuild...I also removed the engine cover and sniffed around in there..doesnt really seem to be any smell in there except maybe a gasoline/oil smell.. but I am going to remove the insulation from the cover and replace it with that foil stick on stuff..

I removed the triangular covers behind the pillars and looked down in there...not much in there but doesnt smell very good in there..

I also took a mirror and looked overhead where the wiring harness runs and I can see evidence of mice turds and nesting materials..even though not alot..

I removed the rubber floor mat again... just seems to smell like an old piece of rubber?

So tonight Im going to remove the battery box and use compressed air and blow out all those areas clearing the loose debris..followed by a good soap and water bath and a brush scrubbing, followed by a pine sol/bleach/ammonia solution to try and disenfect/deodorize it again..

This is getting ridiculous!

Good luck man. That can ruin a nice days drive for sure.

Magic Bus ~ a word of caution, if I remember correctly from chemistry class you do NOT want to combine bleach & ammonia. It would be most uncomfortable in a small enclosed area like one of our vans. ~ Tim.
http://www.doh.wa.gov/ehp/ts/iaq/bleachmixdanger.htm

Mine was that bad. At least now you can line the van better, and not have rot-causing moisture trapped against the walls and roof.

I don't want to alarm you, but please do some reading on hanta-virus. I would imagine that if you were at risk of having been exposed to it, you would already have some symptoms of severe illness. There may be no need for alarm, but may be some precautions you can take going forward. I had the exact same experience cleaning out my van, with turds in the ceiling panels.

You've already stirred around a lot of mouse waste. I hope you are using a mask, or at least being very attentive to your health... I had a sister-in-law die of hanta-virus infection a few days after cleaning a granery. Scat that looks like little grains of rice are safe, but if the variety of mice around there leave scat thats round and rough... be very careful, you must treat that with bleach to limit inhaling airborne virus. I think spraying with diluted bleach is what you need to kill odor and anything else dangerous (without stirring up any dust), and then you can wash or scrape out the crud.

Thanks for watching out for me fellows, you wouldn't think cleaning a little mice stink could be so potentially dangerous!

I did read about the hantavirus, sounds scary enough for me to not fire up the compressor! It did say that the virus would likely only survive 2-3 days so I think I'll be ok. Pretty sure this mess is leftover from the po and I've had this truck almost a year now.

I'll skip the chemical mixing and just bleach it out this time around

So yours was that bad too?

What steps did you have to finally take to eliminate it?

I’d also suggest an enzyme based odor eliminator. the type you get from the pet supply store. it has no real odor itself and the enzyme takes a long time to work. but it sounds like you found most of it.

Van is sitting in my garage, completely gutted. Wood panelling and insulation was gross, first work I did on the van was lose that, even pulled insulation from the edges near the roof seam and behind all the ribs. So there is nothing soft in there to have absorbed any stink anymore.

how about spraying it with a pump sprayer with bleach??

I have no way to get the stick out but I have found a way to keep the little buggers out Bounce dryer sheets . I've tryed moth balls( little bas$%d ate them) but have had good luck with the dryer sheets when I store a vehicle for the winter, plus it smells pretty nice for the first ride Bob

i used bounce also worked great!

ditto on dryer sheets... I plugged a hole in the baseplate of a garage wall where the electrical conduit was routed, and that was a couple years ago now. It's still there. The kind I used was the white fibrous sheets, not the foam ones (not even sure they sell those anymore...)

http://www.nclonline.com/products/view/LEMON_QUAT

or

Zep products are awesome disinfectants and deodorizers.

http://www.zep.com/

Lemon juice and water

I once used a concoction of white wine (the cheap stuff) baking soda and vinegar to get the cat piss smell out of hardwood floors. Only thing that worked...