On Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:49:10 -0700, Cheri wrote:

"aemeijers" wrote in message
...
I'm sure this has come up on here before, but I can't remember what the
best recommended product was. I think something died in my van, and I need
to de-stink it. I pulled the removable seats loose and did an eyeball
inspection, but found no little corpses. Not yet desperate enough to pull
the carpets and interior panels. Used up my remaining quarter-bottle of
Febreeze, too soon to tell if it helped. As usual with these things, smell
is worst after van has been sitting closed for several hours. Smell
arrived with the warm spell a couple days ago.

Will it dry up faster if I leave it parked in sunshine with windows up, or
windows down? And what is best product to saturate the suspect part of
carpets and end of floor heater ducts with? (No stink apparent from the
dash ducts, or seating surfaces, or underside of the seats I flipped over)

You didn't happen to have a leaking baby bottle in it, did you? That can be
ghastly.

LOL! We had a car come into the detailing shop as a trade in, a nice Lexus
300, IIRC, and did a good cleaning. But it had this awful *smell*. We used
an extractor on the seats and the carpets, and set off a 'stink bomb' that
is supposed to remove (or at least cover over) smells, and then ran the
ionizer on it for hours. Next day we came in and opened it up and it STILL
stunk to high heaven. We cleaned it with everything we had, and ran the
ionizer overnight, all night. Smelled good when we came in, but an hour
after removing the ionizer the smell was back again. I went for lunch, and
when I came back the shop foreman, who had started on the car originally,
said, "Hey, JJ, check this out!" On his desk was a milk carton. He just
opened it up on his desk and we all almost gagged! It was shoved *WAY*
under the seat and could only be found by crawling in the back seat with
your head to the floor...

PHEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!