Clearing out my FIL’s house prior to his move to a retirement flat. The garage door was locked shut for about 8-10 years, has been fixed and we now have access to the large chest freezer within. We have unplugged and opened the lid to find that the freezer had obviously failed some years ago. About 6″ depth of brown sludgy liquid, slopping about the freezer compartment, has been tipped by a well meaning relative over the concrete garage floor. I think their intention was to brush and hose it out the front of the garage but it has seeped into the ridged concrete floor. The garage now smells like there’s been a summer long power failure at the local mortuary.

Any effective way of clearing this before the house move in a couple of weeks? Bleach? Disinfectant? something Else? I doubt the new owners will be amused at having eau de Frizl about the place as the weather warms up.

Thanks in advance.

You see, this is the kinda thing that happens if you dont have the patio ready before you bump her off!

dig up the concrete and replace? I really don’t have a clue.

Maybe sprinkle with lime to draw out any moisture and kill any bacteria?

Gross 😯

Mop and bleach?

Does it affect the garage floor though?

Dry the concrete with a space heater, then get a few cans of garage floor paint & seal it in

Cheap stuff from B&Q will suffice after a sweep – then just pour 1/4 of a can at a time and roller it on

Jeyes Fluid?

Stick a dead body in there with a heater for a couple of days. The new occupiers will just assume the smell is from the stiff and it won’t even cross their minds that it came from a broken freezer.

I’d go with the dry & paint option & seal the stench in.

Caustic soda on the floor maybe?

You don’t want to mask it or cover it up. It could come back and be even harder to fix!

Call a local janitorial supply company or Google “commercial odor neutralizer”

You need an enzymatic cleaner.

Diet coke, gets most things off concrete including old engine oil, so anything organic should go too. Just bleach afterwards too

Lime.

Yes, an enzyme cleaner or even laundry detergent or diswash detergent, hot. Brush vigorously and jetwash the liquid out to where the sun can get to work on it.

Of course, Enzyme cleaners include Bio Washing powder. That could be the cheapest bulk buy solution if we can’t source a dead body. We can soak it in that for a couple of days, switch to disinfectant to ease the pong, then scrub and hose or borrow a pressure washer.

Thanks all.

Could you steam it?

Otherwise a peroxide bleach would be my choice.

There is a company I’ve looked at for work when we were trying to mask a particularly smelly chemical.

http://www.northeast-chemicals.co.uk/page2.html

The may be able to advise on a suitable product. joshvegas makes a good point as it is likely a biological problem so an enzymatic cleaner will probably work.

Just remember what your removing when the jet wash splatter hits you in the face 😉

If using enzyme cleaners then don’t use hot water, 40c at the absolute max, anything warmer will denature the little fellas so they wont work.

Use a jetwash with a patio cleaner attachment which reduces mist/splatter to almost nothing.

Jeyes

Caustic soda.

Defo Jeyes, neat.
I once had a dead rat in my cellar & the smell was unbelievable. Neat Jeyes got rid of it, not exactly roses but better than dead rat.

Good luck with the task in hand, we used to use doe is list cleaning firms for rotting stiffs….and if the smell got in your uniform the only way of getting rid of it was dispose of the uniform! I did 😆 at the get a dead body in to mask the smell.
Look at it this way you now will be able to identify death and organic rotting at 50 paces, once smelled never forgotten 😆

A few hundred of these hanging off the rafters?

Good luck with the task in hand, we used to use doe is list cleaning firms for rotting stiffs….and if the smell got in your uniform the only way of getting rid of it was dispose of the uniform! I did at the get a dead body in to mask the smell.
Look at it this way you now will be able to identify death and organic rotting at 50 paces, once smelled never forgotten

Putrescine, or tetramethylenediamine, is a foul-smelling organic chemical compound NH2(CH2)4NH2 (1,4-diaminobutane or butanediamine) that is related to cadaverine; both are produced by the breakdown of amino acids in living and dead organisms and both are toxic in large doses.

?

Washing your uniform easily gets rid of the smell, unless you’re a bit melodramatic.

I’d suggest jays or caustic soda or something similary powerful.. Give it a good spreading.. Leave it for a day, then jet wash the place out.

jeyes is going to stink though. I’d go with someone non-smelling to start with.

No the one occasion that led to disposal, even stuff in the car that had been nowhere near the rotting deceased (his arm fell off when I tried to pull him out of his car) had to be thrown the next day….even the Coroners notes I had made stank of death and had people wretching the next day….it was back in the day of wool uniform, which you would have thought would have taken on the smell less. Everyone that attended that scene was throwing up purely with the stench 😆

Bleach seemed to work for this guy

cadaverine! Love it. Ye olde woollen tunic has never been incinerated. Inhale, exhale, whisky.

We have some of this stuff at work…

http://www.cleaning-warehouse.co.uk/Products/00180001/IMP004

…for cleaning ‘bodily fluids and solids’ from cells. Nice.

Once (as entrepreneurial teenager) cleaned an ex-abbatoir that was shoe-deep in black stuff that smelled like the bowels of hell.

We enlisted help from a local pool attendant who gave us a shedload of chlorine. Did the job. Mixed it too neat (by a factor of 100) first time, broomed it all around including ceiling (not much ventilation, they were badically steel-lined cells) and nearly passed out/asphyxiated not to mention lips went blue and peeled the next day. Blargh. Got rid of the stench tho.

Caustic Soda

Concrete sealant

hire one of those carpet washers and use that

Come summer, that place is going to be swarming 😯

Hot caustic soda a couple of times then jayes

Clean it as best you can (enzyme, jeyes or whatever), then dry the floor and seal it with a concrete sealer then a coat of garage floor paint. Unfortunatly, fluids soak in to concrete and are very tricky to extract or deal with.

I speak from experience, previous owners of my house had kept 8 cats in one room, the concrete floor was soaked in cats urine leaving an over-powering stench (the surveyor refused to enter the room). Concrete sealer and a coat of floor paint did the trick.