Caring for Your Bed Sheets and Pillow Cases
Caring for your bed and mattress is one thing, but your bed sheets, blankets, and pillowcases deserve their own special treatment as well. Here are some tips on how you can prolong the life of your valuable bed linen.
Washing bed linen
• In general, most bed linen should be washed in cool or tepid water at a lower temperature than 104°F. Hot water is generally not necessary nor recommended, although you will want to check the label for exceptions to this rule.
• If you feel that your bed linen is fairly clean, you may want to set the wash cycle to “light” in order to make them last longer.
• Don’t use too much detergent. Most bed linen will do just fine with half of the amount of detergent recommended by the instructions on the detergent’s box. If you happen to use too much detergent, you may want to run the bed linen through another rinse cycle.
• Do not use bleach unless absolutely necessary as it will cause the fabrics to break down much faster.
Drying bed linen
• Keep the bed linen in the dryer only until it is just short of totally dry. This will lessen wrinkles in the fabric.
• Make sure that you remove the bed linen from the dryer as soon as possible and fold them quickly. Again, this will lessen the wrinkles.
• If wrinkles develop in spite of your best efforts, throw a slightly damp cloth into the dryer along with the bed linen and run it for an additional ten minutes.
