Sanitizing Your Fabrics Against Parvo
SNiPER Kills Parvo on Contact
Oh No! Your new puppy has been diagnosed with Canine Parvovirus and you are scrambling to figure out how to clean your home and its contents. If you are smart, you don’t use bleach inside your home because bleach is so highly toxic to pets and people. You would later regret that very much. Sniper kills parvo and is easy to apply around your home and won’t cause any issues for the occupants of the home, whether pets or people. Hard surfaces are easy – just spray and walk away. Those hard surfaces need to stay wet for 10 minutes to ensure that you kill this virus successfully. After that you are on to the next stage – how to treat soft or porous surfaces such as laundry or sofas.
The EPA maintains that you cannot disinfect soft, porous surfaces. That would include clothing, fabrics, sleeping mats and so on. So, what do you do to make your home safe again? How can you clean Parvo from fabrics in your home? SNiPER is your one-stop solution! This gentle, friendly disinfectant is lab tested to kill Parvo. Using SNiPER, you can clean Parvo from fabrics in your home.
Disinfect Versus Sanitize
There are two commonly accepted standards for biologically clean. Here is a good way to understand these two. Imagine that you take a piece of paper and place a dot on it and then draw a line starting at the dot and moving away from it and not ending, but having an arrow at the tip to indicate that the line continues on much further. This represents a condition of having zero biological life – sterile. This is an end point because you can’t get cleaner than sterile. But then you add a microbe or two (and the addition of these microbes now means that it is no longer sterile), and now that surface has some germs on it. Continuing down that line you are accumulating more and more microbes – getting dirtier and dirtier and so on. There is no end to how dirty something can get. This imaginary line represents the real world and your home environment is a point somewhere along that line. It is not practical to think that you can make your home sterile, but to clean up after Parvo, you should be able to get it somewhere between disinfected and sanitized.
Disinfecting With SNiPER
If you want your home to be as clean as possible, you can aim for the first level of clean – disinfected. Commonly accepted terminology has it that a good disinfectant will kill 99.999% of germs in some time period (usually 10 minutes, because that is the maximum length of time the lab tests are allowed to run). Again, this is what the EPA defines as disinfected.
There is a second point along that line where the disinfectant used kills only 99.9% of germs, within 1 minute of exposure. This lesser standard is commonly known as “sanitized”. It doesn’t seem like much of a difference, does it? 99.9% versus 99.999%, but a microbiologist will tell you it is very important.
Sanitizing With SNiPER
Sanitizing is what the EPA says we can achieve and this is what we want to accomplish with your soft and porous surfaces. The EPA has granted Sniper the “Sanitizer” status at a dilution of 6 parts water to one part Sniper. Now lets go back to that imaginary line we drew. When you need to clean fabrics suspected of harboring parvovirus, this is what we will aim for. And since we can dilute Sniper by 6 to 1, you will have a lot of cleaning fluid to work with, so it will be easier.
When you are diluting Sniper, bear in mind those two points along that line – disinfected and sanitized. Full strength, you can achieve disinfection. At 6 to 1 dilution – sanitized. If you dilute by say, 3 to 1, then you will be somewhere along that line, in between those two points. An easy way to think about dilution is to know that Sniper comes from the factory with 2,000 parts per million of ClO2 – the primary active ingredient. When you dilute by 1 to 1, you are at 1,000 ppm. At 6 to 1 dilution, you are at around 330 ppm.
How Treat Fabrics Against Parvo?
Furniture
If you are going to spray full strength SNiPER, it is always a good idea to test the fabric first, just to make sure. It is rare for SNiPER to cause any fading or bleaching, but better safe than sorry. Most fabrics will be fine because SNiPER is non-corrosive.
Begin by deciding what level of dilution you want and dilute accordingly. A 1 to 1 dilution resulting in 1,000 ppm of ClO2 will work for most people. Spray the fabrics with an even coating of SNiPER. Allow it to remain wet for up to 10 minutes. You are done.
Laundry
Sanitizing clothing and towels is a bit more challenging because of the different cleaning methods you may use. But follow these instructions to clean Parvo from fabrics safely and effectively.
Top Loader
A top-loading washer is the easiest! Here’s how: Set the water level to the minimum that will
completely cover the clothing/towels and start the wash cycle with cool water. Once the cycle starts, push in the knob to temporarily halt the cycle. Add some SNiPER. Here, you should aim for around 400 to 500 ppm of ClO2. Swish it around to mix thoroughly and then add the clothing. Push in the knob to restart the cycle and allow it to agitate for 1 to 2 minutes and then push the knob in to temporarily stop the cycle again. Remember that to fully disinfect, you need 10 minutes of contact time with full-strength SNiPER. Here, we have diluted SNiPER as much as we dare, but we will substitute additional time to give more time for the disinfectant to do its job. Leave the clothing in the wash just soaking for up to 45 minutes. At the end of that time, push in the know to restart the cycle and allow it to finish. From there, you can just throw the clothes into the washer and you are done.
Front Loader
Front loaders are more difficult and there are a couple of ways to approach this. One way is to use a large wash tub and just soak the clothes as in the top loader method. After the soak, drain the tub and put the clothes into your top loader for a “quick cycle” (on my machine, these only run for around 15 minutes). The goal here is just to rinse and spin dry. The disinfecting work has already been done in the soak stage.
A second approach is to use the settings on your front loader to accomplish the same long soak time. Front loaders vary enough that there is no way to know what setting will work for you. But if you read through the top loader instructions, you should be able to select what will do the same thing – a longer soak than normal. When running this cycle, instead of using detergent, pour in SNiPER instead. Pour a lot! Remember that the stronger you can make this dilution, the better result you will get. (Another possibility for front loaders is to run a quick cycle, but stop it before it gets to the rinse stage and then turn the machine off for the soak stage. You can repeat this as necessary.)
Sanitizing Your Carpets And Rugs
There are essentially two methods here – using a carpet cleaning machine, or just spraying. Home carpet cleaning machines vary a lot and you will likely need to think about all of what we have written here to figure out how to achieve the best result. Again, the first step is to choose what dilution (level of clean) you want to aim for. The best plan will be to use undiluted SNiPER in place of detergent. It may be that your machine will dilute a bit as it goes. Read the instructions on your machine to make sure you understand what dilution you will wind up with. In this case, clean your carpets using SNiPER. When you are done, put some full strength SNiPER into a pump-up garden style sprayer and spray the entire carpet. The first step – using your machine – gets the carpet thoroughly wet. Then the extra spray increases the potency of it and your carpet should stay wet with SNiPER for several hours, just because it is a wet carpet and they take time to dry. Do put fans on it to speed the drying process.
You may decide to hire a professional carpet cleaner with a truck mounted machine for “steam” cleaning. Ask the cleaner to use the hottest temperature possible. When he is gone and while the carpet is still wet, spray the carpet using a pump-up sprayer at a 1 to 1 dilution with SNiPER.
The easiest method is to just use that pump-up sprayer and spray the whole carpet. This will work, but you will need to dilute by at least 3 water to o ne SNiPER so that you have sufficient solution to cover the entire carpet. A dry carpet has an enormous surface area and it is difficult to break the surface tension. This requires more solution to be sprayed down.
Pet Bedding
For your pets bedding, you can choose between just throwing it away and getting new bedding or treating it with SNiPER. If you decide to treat, check if you can remove the cover and toss it in with other laundry fabrics. That would be easiest. Be sure to spray any padding thoroughly before putting the cover back on. If you cannot remove the cover, it may be easiest to just throw it away – just to be on the safe side.
In Conclusion
Discovering that your new puppy has Parvo is heartbreaking. The pain and distress it causes us humans is not easy. On top of all that mental pain, it can be an enormous amount of work to get your home ready for the puppy again. SNiPER disinfectant is a great product to help make your home safe for your puppy again because it is non-corrosive and won’t damage your home. With SNiPER, you can clean Parvo from fabrics and treat soft porous surfaces such as laundry and fabric furniture.
Additional Resources to Help Guide You
2) Introducing Chlorine Dioxide
3) Remove Canine Parvovirus With SNiPER
4) The Effects of Chlorine Dioxide on Animals
Our dog had parvo , when we brought her home from hospital she had a accident in the car on a rubber mat with a towel under it. All was thrown away, But , the smell is terrible . I have tried Clorox wipes on everything, Lysol, special product to remove odor, nothing works. Do u have any help for me.
Hi Barb – I’m very sorry to hear about your dog. There is a very easy way to apply Sniper (or Nokout) inside your car. Get yourself a “cool mist vaporizer” and put Sniper in the reservoir. Put the whole thing in the car and let the door close on the electric cord. The idea is to allow the vaporizer to build up a thick fog of Sniper inside the car. This fog will penetrate deeply and come into contact with the smelly stuff. You may have to do this more than once, but it should work for you.
Could you use the same method that you recommended for the car, for a small apartment? Use a cool mist vaporizer?
Hi Brecka,
Thank you for writing.
It would require a larger vaporizer to be successful I think. For the most part, these vaporizers are only useful for very small spaces because they are very slow and just don’t put out much vapor. For larger spaces, they are so slow that they just don’t do the job very well because they just can’t put sufficient vaporized Sniper (or Nokout) to accomplish anything. You may be successful if you try it one room at a time. Perhaps this would limit the space enough that it could work for you.
What if you wash one load with bleach and the next with Sniper. Will the drained water combo cause toxic fumes?
I don’t think that any toxic fumes would be released. Be aware, however, that bleach is a really poor quality disinfectant. If it is more than 60 days past the date of manufacture, it has likely lost more than 50% of its disinfecting properties.
If this product is inhaled am I safe ?
Can I wash my laundry with this product ?
Is it safe to spray in a house with kids ( family friendly) ?
What happens if mixed with bleach ?
Is this product safe ?
What are the do’s and do not’s ?
Is it toxic ?
Do I dilute the product ?
Hi Tommy,
Nokout and Sniper are both non-toxic to pets and people, but as a disinfectant, Sniper is considered lethal to microorganisms. The EPA evaluates all disinfecting products for toxicity in 4 areas – to skin, to eyes, to lungs (another body surface exposed to the environment) and if ingested and Sniper receives the lowest toxicity rating the EPA gives out, in all four categories. Nokout has the same active ingredient and is equally safe.
You can dilute by half. You can dilute by up to 6 parts water to one part Sniper and use that solution to “sanitize”.
There is not too much in the way of “do nots”, but if you are spraying fabrics with full strength Sniper, it is ALWAYS prudent to check that the fabric is colorfast first.
Sniper will not cause harm if inhaled.
You can wash your laundry with Sniper.
Sniper is family friendly.
Ah! Here is a “do not”! DO NOT MIX Sniper or Nokout with bleach! You should NEVER mix bleach with anything other than water.
Thanks Ted I appreciate the help, what if I mix bleach and sniper, what can happen?
Hi Tommy,
I’m sorry, but I don’t know the answer to your question. I know that chlorine dioxide gas is produced spontaneously with the mixing of chlorine and sodium chlorite. As I not a chemist, the mixing of cleaning chemicals worries me because I don’t know what might come out of any such mixing. So I usually err on the side of caution and recommend that people don’t mix cleaning compounds. It is safer.
Can you explain a little more detailed about how much you can dilute the sniper with water and maybe give an example so I know I will be doing it correctly? Thank you
Hi Angela, Thanks for writing. Please read through this article: https://nokout.com/what-level-of-clean-is-right-for-you/. You can dilute Sniper by up to 6 (water) to 1 (Sniper) for “sanitizing”. Give Ted a call at 512 607 6621 if you still have questions.
I just lost my puppy to parvo and I need to clean my house where I have all wood floors, plus the inside of my car and my couch. What can I use I don’t have access to a vaporizer can I dilute it and use it in my steam cleaner for my couch? I’ve never had to clean up after parvo so I don’t know really what I’m doing
Hi Kristin,
Thank you for writing.
I’m so sorry to hear that you have a Parvo issue – this can be a really difficult problem.
We have some articles you can read that will help: https://nokout.com/sniper-is-lab-tested-to-kill-parvo/, https://nokout.com/clean-parvo-from-fabrics/, https://nokout.com/sniper-is-lab-tested-to-kill-parvo/, this one is more general, but may help you think about how you clean for this: https://nokout.com/what-level-of-clean-is-right-for-you/ and https://nokout.com/sanitize-your-floor-with-sniper/
For Parvo – don’t dilute! Also, don’t put Sniper into your steam cleaner – the high heat destroys the active i ingredient in Sniper. Instead, use Sniper full strength and just spray the couch directly. But do test that your couch is colorfast. Wrap a clean soft white cloth around your index finger and spray the fingertip with Sniper until it is drenched. Rub vigorously in an inconspicuous for 20 seconds or so, then examine the fingertip. If no color transfers, you will likely be fine to spray full strength
These should help you get a handle on what to do, but if you still have questions, give me a call in the morning time and I can answer your questions.
Best Wishes !
Can I use this on skin after direct contact with puppy or puppy feces to avoid cross contamination to my other dogs and does this work on coccidia as well?
Thank you
Sniper does not cause harm to skin. Sorry, but I don’t know about the coccidia, but I am sure it won’t do any harm.
does this product work on feline panleukopenia?
Hi Dawn, We have not tested specifically against it but it is from the family “Parvoviridae” and we did test specifically against one member of that “family”, so I feel confident that it will also kill this member of that family.