Product Review: Glade Carpet & Room Deodorizer

Anyone who's going off to live in a college dorm this fall needs to know one thing: keeping stink off the floor is a key to success. Living in the dorms are not like living with the parents; i.e., things get dirty quick, especially carpets. This may result as a genuine lack of cleanliness, laziness, or simply a miscommunication involving one or more distustingly filthy roommates.

Glade Carpet & Room Deodorizer can help prevent a dorm room from smelling like a wet boot. While vacuuming is arguably the most important task involving room maintenance - typically up there with dusting and hosing vomit off of the ceiling - it may not do the job of masking the odors that sink down deep inside the carpet.

In fact, contemporary vacuums fail to actually remove the majority of the dust particles from the rooms themselves; vacuum cleaner bags clog up all the time. And serious air-flow issues remain, too. Ever stuck your nose near the vacuum's exhaust? Pair this with the random nastiness of things being spilt on the floors of young adults [who are responsible for living on their own for the first time in their lives] and that is one stinky funk.

So, although Glade Carpet & Room Deodorizer 'contains a formula that first eliminates deep-down odors caused by pets, smoke, dampness, and mildew' it won't necessarily make the dorm room any cleaner, it will make the room at least smell cleaner. That means the girls sitting on the futon won't pick up the direct stench coming from squirrels, cigars, beer, and cafeteria crumbs deep within the dorm floor.

Indeed Glade Carpet & Room Deodorizer does its job of masking odors and, if very few odors reside in the carpet, might even make a clean room smell better than before. The directions are simple: sprinkle a half cup of the powder product evenly from wall-to-wall, wait a few minutes, and vacuum well.

The carpet deodorizer is quite cheap and accessible. The packaging, despite its old-school flowery exterior, works well because it is easy to store. I.e., it closes (like a parmegian cheese container) and is roughly the size of a tennis ball tube. It also lasts a surprisingly long time and comes in a variety of scents.

These scents can also be combined. Try demonstrating that little factoid to your roommate - it just might blow a mind (and send a good clean message).

Take it from a dorm-room alumni when it comes to cleanliness and buy some carpet deodorizer for your carpet.