The best air freshener solution for a funeral home is a combination of one or more odor removal tools to remove unpleasant smells, along with a scented oil diffuser to introduce new fragrances. This combination will allow your guests to be greeted appropriately by a lovely scent of your choice, instead of by the old “weird, musty” smell of many funeral homes.
One common issue for funeral homes is that they simply smell like an old building. This is because funeral homes often operate in the same building for decades.
If the interior has not been significantly redecorated in that time, then unpleasant odors that are absorbed by the carpet and furniture over many years will seep out and greet your guests.
The good news is that there are several good solutions for both removing bad odors, and introducing new ones. Your priority in most cases should be: First, get rid of bad smells. Then, add a new good smell.
How To Remove Odors From Funeral Homes
Option #1: Removing Odors From Old Furniture
The first question to answer is whether the smells are coming from daily operations, or from the building, carpets, and furniture itself.
If odor is coming from old furniture that has never been washed, it can usually be abolished by using a highly concentrated fabric cleaner.
I recommend the following products for removing odors from old furniture:
- Tide Antibacterial Fabric Deodorizer – For removing odors without leaving a strong new fragrance – Click here to view.
- OdoBan Scented Fabric Cleaner – For removing odors and leaving a new fragrance in their place – Click here to view.
Option #2: Removing Odors From Old Carpet
Smelly furniture may be the least of your concerns. Another very common problem is old carpets that have been absorbing funky smells for years, and now they’re emanating them constantly and assaulting your senses.
While it would be nice to pay a professional carpet cleaner to clean regularly, we can’t all afford that. Instead, we can use a much cheaper solution and clean the carpets ourselves with an odor-removing carpet cleaning product.
With most carpet odor remover products, you need to sprinkle the powder or other solution all over the carpet to be cleaned. Then, let it sit for several hours, or ideally over night. Finally, vacuum it up the next day. The odor remover will absorb odor molecules in the carpet, leaving them smelling much better after you’re done vacuuming.
I recommend the following cleaners for removing old carpet odors:
- SMELLEZE Natural Corpse Odor Remover – Made specifically for removing the odor of corpses – Click here to view.
- Industrial Odor Eliminator – Made for removing any odor from carpets – Click here to view.
Option #3: Removing Odors From The Air
If your funeral home simply smells bad because of daily operations, then you need a solution for constant removal of odors from the local air. There are a few good ways to do this.
The first option is to get an air purifier that is equipped with an odor-absorbing activated carbon filter. This is probably your best option, as it will clean more air via its fan and filter than the other stationary options mentioned below.
I recommend this affordable air purifier which can also be used as a standing fan:
- Eureka Affordable Air Purifier – Click here to view.
- Odor-Absorbing Activated Carbon Filters – Sold separately – Click here to view.
The second option is to use decorative bags or sacks of odor-absorbing materials. There are many chemical compounds that naturally absorb odor particles that come into contact with them.
You can buy porous cloth containers filled with these compounds. The cloth container sites around the room as a decorative item, while absorbing odor particles that are floating through the air.
These bags can last a long time by “recharging” them with ultraviolet (UV) light. The UV light causes the odor-absorbing compounds inside the bag to release the odors they have trapped. You can expose these bags to UV light by leaving them outside in the sun for a few hours, or even by microwaving them for a few minutes.
See our recommended odor-absorbing decorative bags here:
- SMELLEZE Reusable Funeral Home Smell Remover – Click here to view.
- MOSO NATURAL Odor-Absorbing Bags – Value pack of 4 bags – Click here to view.
Option #4: Removing Odors From The Whole Building
If your whole building has an unpleasant odor that you’d like to get rid of, or if the bad smells just keep coming back sooner than you’d like, then it may be wise to invest in an ozone gas generator.
Ozone is a natural gas that can be produced by exposing oxygen to an electric current. The “charged” oxygen, known as ozone, floats around the room and collides with odor-causing particles. This oxidizes the odor particles, which basically means it destroys their chemical structure, removing their bad odor.
An ozone generator is considered the best way to get rid of intense smells in an entire room all at once. You just leave it running for an afternoon or overnight while nobody is in the building. The ozone gas will spread out and seep into every crack and crevice, destroying odor particles absolutely everywhere – in the carpet, the furniture, the walls, the vents, and anywhere else the gas can reach.
Do not use this while people are in the building, as ozone should not be breathed heavily by humans or pets. Allow the room you use it in to sit for a day before people will be coming back in. By then, the newly created ozone will be dissipated, and the odor particles along with it.
See my recommended ozone generator here:
- Enerzen Commercial Ozone Generator – For heavy duty odor removal from entire rooms at a time – Click here to view.
How To Add New Fragrances To Your Funeral Home
It’s important to note that odor removal should be done separately from the process of adding new scents to a room. This is because chemicals and filters that remove bad smell will also remove pleasant ones.
The smell-creating particles of a bad odor are chemically similar to the smell-creating particles of good scents. Thus, if you run a scented oil diffuser to fill the room with the smell of fresh flowers while also running a carbon filter air purifier to absorb odors, the carbon filter is just going to suck the fresh flower scent right out of the room.
I recommend doing your deep cleaning of furniture and carpets first. Then, if odors persist, use an odor absorber like the air purifier or the bags for a few days to a week.
When most of the lingering odors are finally gone, then is the time to introduce a new scent.
To fill your funeral home with new fragrances, I recommend two options. The first is a decorative candle wax warmer that you will be filling with scented oils instead of candle wax. The second is an essential oil diffuser that will do basically the same thing, but just looks different.
A candle wax warmer or a small oil diffuser are fine for small rooms. For larger rooms or for adding fragrances to an entire building, you’ll need a more powerful aroma diffuser.
See my favorite selection of candle wax warmers and scented oil diffusers here:
- Scented Oils 6-Scent Value Pack – Click here to view.
- Decorative Candle Wax Warmer – Can be used to warm up scented oils, spreading their fragrance through a small room – Available in 15 different lovely designs – Click here to view.
- Basic Essential Oil Diffuser – For a small to medium sized room – Click here to view.
- Advanced Essential Oil Diffuser – For larger rooms – Comes with many adjustment settings to get the perfect strength of aroma in your building – Click here to view.
