BasicTraveler

Steam cleaning urine is a bad idea. The heat will cause it to bind to the carpet even better and make it even harder to get rid of.

it’s obvious their pets handled the moving process poorly and have urinated in every room with carpet

Cleaning up pet urine can be really expensive depending on how bad it is. If it’s not just a few spots here and there, seriously consider ripping out all of the carpet and padding and living on the floor boards until you can get new flooring.

You should buy a black light. Nothing expensive, $20 or so. And shine it on everything with the lights off, urine glows. As a side note, anyone looking to buy a house, or even get a new rental should get a black light.

It’s about $50 a month. Nothing gets released at my house, which is nice. I’m a little out of my depth with the chemical reaction, but the idea is inside the tank are a bunch of resin beads impregnated with stuff calcium and magnesium ions will bind to. So as water flows through the tank the calcium and magnesium is removed and stored in the beads. So the beads store it, but can’t store an infinite amount. The tank gets switched out every 2 weeks and culligan takes the old tank back and reverse the process. I’m sure this involves nasty stuff, but hopefully economy of scale and regulations make it a cleaner process than just dumping the salt in the ground.

Brine discharge can be pretty bad for the environment, so we do some tank exchange thing with Culligan. Every other week they install a new tank and remove the old one to be recharged. Working great so far.