Do pet urine detectors actually work?

October 22, 2024 12:41 PM

We have an elderly dog and suspect that she may have been having more accidents than we're aware of. Are any of the pet urine detectors we see online/at Petco/whatever any good at what they claim to do? Do you have one and find it to be worth recommending? Much obliged!

In general we are usually around to witness her accidents, but I have a sneaking suspicion that she may have started getting up and wandering in the night. Generally, we'd be trying to detect smaller accidents on dark/patterned rugs, and probably not *that* long after they have happened but probably after they have mostly dried.

It seems like the detectors online have every kind of review imaginable, so I've no idea if any of them are actually good, if all of them are the same mix of "will work sometimes and other times be trash," or if it's all snake oil and no such thing truly exists.

Help?

posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese to Pets & Animals (11 answers total)

If it is fully dry, a UV flashlight will work (err, assuming the room is dark). It will not work well if things are not fully dry.

...added bonus, now you can also use UV glues, which are awesome!

(also, just get a general UV flashlight, not one that's marketed specifically for pets unless you don't care about the extra markup)
posted by aramaic at 1:03 PM on October 22 [5 favorites]

I don't know about detectors but one thing you can possibly do is to minimize where she goes when you're asleep/not around. Crate training is used for this purpose, but you can just block off rooms. This is what we do with our dog who was having diarrea in the middle of the night. We restricted her to just our bedroom and hallway on the 2nd floor and therefore we could hear her without her sneaking off.
posted by j810c at 1:06 PM on October 22

Yeah, I got a random UV flashlight to see where my cats were peeing and it worked. There may have been false positives but I'd rather use too much Nature's Miracle than too little. I also tried to set up a motion detecting camera to catch them in the act and that didn't work as well.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:38 PM on October 22 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: We will definitely start restricting her nighttime access if necessary, but we don't want to do that unless we're sure she's having trouble, because she's extremely used to her little nighttime perimeter checks and there will for sure be a ruckus if we close her in somewhere (very few doors or even doorways in our small open-concept apartment; she would need to be confined to a single bedroom).
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:01 PM on October 22 [2 favorites]

I have never been able to find the source of the (dried) cat pee smell with a UV flashlight. Since people are recommending that, maybe there are pointers for using it that I missed that could be beneficial to OP.

OP - Maybe a motion activated camera could help?
posted by bluesky78987 at 2:05 PM on October 22 [2 favorites]

I've used black lights / UV lights before and can confirm a good solid one will do a good job in identifying pee. Note it also highlights anything white, so false positives are a thing and i would assume it wouldn't work on white surfaces although I haven't tested this theory myself.

+1 to motion activated cameras at night to just check in on what she's up to overall. Set them on a timer so the cameras don't feel intrusive to your daytime activities. Wyze makes decent cheap cameras I've used for this purpose.

That reminds me, my next askme should be to see if anyone has any ideas on how to tell cat and dog pee apart, aside from catching the culprit on camera...
posted by cgg at 2:23 PM on October 22

You can even tell the difference between different dogs/ cats.
posted by porpoise at 2:53 PM on October 22

Cats will designate an area as a "kitchen" if they eat there, or a "bathroom" if they pee there. They won't pee in a "kitchen" so it's helpful to encourage them to think of those special areas as kitchens.

So, anywhere you think she's peeing, turn it into an eating area! First, clean the spot really well, using enzyme cleaner, to remove any lingering pee that might be there.

Then, feed her in that spot - either scatter lots of treats in that area, or even split her daily meal into several smaller portions and put one portion on each area you think she's already peeing on, or thinking about peeing on. Put food there a couple times a month to strengthen the association.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 3:11 PM on October 22 [2 favorites]

There's a lot of great tips here for finding stains if you do end up getting a UV light. We had one carpet that I knew had been peed on that happened to be dark and patterned and wouldn't show any stains under our UV light, but the permanent carpet in the bedroom that was here when we moved in had all kinds of horrors appear.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:41 PM on October 22 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Cats will designate an area as a "kitchen" if they eat there, or a "bathroom" if they pee there. They won't pee in a "kitchen" so it's helpful to encourage them to think of those special areas as kitchens.

(She's a dog tho)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:03 AM on October 23 [3 favorites]

>(She's a dog tho)
Ok step one is to get a cat. Then do the other stuff I said.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 2:04 PM on October 24 [2 favorites]