4 Blunders to Avoid When Cleaning Your Sheets

Doing laundry can seem like one of those easy and mundane tasks that don’t need much thought or effort, thanks to washing machines. Once you are careful enough not to mix clothes that have running colors with clothes with non-running colors, there is not much to worry about beyond that. Right? Well, this is clearly not the case. Mistakes that can ruin your laundry can be made.

Let’s take the case of bed sheets as an example. If you clean your sheets in the wrong way, they will not only make you uncomfortable and ruin a good night’s sleep, they could also cost you more because they won’t last as long as they could if you washed them the proper way. Whether you are cleaning cheap bed linen or expensive sheets, avoiding the following blunders will help them last longer and serve you better.

1. Don’t put your linen and your towels in the same wash and dryer
It is not an uncommon idea that when doing your laundry, you may think about washing your sheets together with your towels. If you do, you would be making quite a huge blunder. You see, towels get to produce a lot of lint when washed and this can adhere to your sheets and form several small lint balls on the sheets if washed together with towels.

You therefore want to absolutely avoid washing bed linen together with any sort of towels or fabrics that can produce a lot of lint. Ideally, you should wash designer bed sheets by themselves.

2. Don’t leave your sheets in the washing machine
Another common blunder that is easy to make is leaving bed sheets in the washing machine after they have been washed. The problem with this is that during the washing machine rinse cycles, the sheets are pressed on the washing machine so that if given more and more time to dry, the sheets develop very hard to remove creases.

These creases can be very hard to manage and you will have to also do a lot of ironing to give them a good feel again.

3. Don’t use harsh detergents or too much detergent
As with most other clothes and fabrics, the less detergent you use to clean your bed linen, the longer the fabric will last. This also applies to using harsh detergent because the detergent actually serves to weaken the fabric progressively as it is used more and more.

Besides, since bed sheets don’t get as dirty as your pair of jeans, there is no need to use too much detergent or harsh detergent, for that matter, in order to get the sheets clean.

4. Don’t wash your linen in a hot water cycle
If you have cotton sheets, whether expensive ones or cheaper ones, hot water is not good for this natural fabric. Using hot water to clean your cotton sheets is not only bad for the environment because it means that you use a lot of extra energy unnecessarily, but it will also shrink your cotton sheets. Using cool water will do the job just right.