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Dealfable Journal

The Dog Owner's Guide to Getting Your Car Back

Straight talk from the bay. This is the kind of thing we say to customers over the counter at Palm Cove, written down so you can come back to it later without ringing us again. No filler, no sales pitch, just what actually works on a Queensland car.

Written by the Dealfable crew Practical, no jargon Short read
There is a particular look on a dog owner's face when they drop the car off. It is somewhere between embarrassment and hope. Two Labrador-sized dogs, six months of beach runs and a hot Australian summer have done their thing, and the car smells like a wet dog's blanket that has been left in a hot shed. We have seen that car hundreds of times and it is genuinely fixable. The first thing to understand is that dog smell is not one problem, it is three. There is the surface fur, which you can mostly vacuum out with patience. There is the oil and dander embedded in the fabric, which needs hot-water extraction to pull out. And there is the bacteria living in the damp parts of the seat foam and underneath, which is what keeps the smell coming back no matter how many times you clean the surface. Miss the third one and you will be back where you started within a fortnight. So our process for a dog car is a bit different from a standard interior deep clean. We pull the seats out entirely, because half the fur and most of the smell is under the rails and in the bracket recesses. The rear bench foam gets extracted and then allowed to dry properly in the drying booth. Fabric stains get treated with an enzyme-based solution that breaks down the proteins in saliva and urine rather than just masking them. Then we run an ozone cycle through the whole cabin, which kills the bacteria rather than just covering the scent. A few things you can do at home to keep the car from getting back to the bad place. A fitted rear seat cover and a boot liner take you thirty seconds to shake out and save a lot of money down the track. If your dog swims, a towel-down in the driveway before they get in stops most of the saltwater and sand getting into the fabric at all. And if you have a fabric-interior car and a water-loving dog, a monthly quick vacuum with a rubber pet-hair brush is honestly the difference between needing a deep clean every six months and a deep clean every two years. Ring the bay if you want a quote for a full dog-owner reset.
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