The Cause of Stench from Half-dried Cloth - How to Dry Up the Thick Mattress Cover Properly-

As I mentioned in my previous entry, my husband and I took our mattress cover to the dry cleaner to get it cleaned. However, they left strong stench on our mattress cover. :( It smelled like bleach and half-dried cloth. I guess that the dry cleaner left the wet mattress cover for many days because the mattress cover was pretty thick and too big to dry up. I know it was not easy for even the professional dry cleaner to clean up the mattress cover, but who can sleep on a foul mattress cover? :(

I guess that many people never know how half-dried cloth smells because they never have experience about that. While most American people usually use dryer machines after washing clothing, most Japanese people hang laundries out to dry. It's because you can save energy and expect ultraviolet sterilization effect by hanging them outside. However, if you do not dry them properly, it will smell horrendously. During raining season, most Japanese people have to hang the laundries inside home. It obviously takes time to dry them up inside home completely. When I lived in Japan, I always tried to avoid hanging the laundries inside home. I know the smell of half-dried cloth. It is terrible and yucky!

The cause of odor is bacterial growth because wet cloth is suitable for culturing bacteria. The key to avoid that is to dry up your laundries as fast as possible before bacteria growth.

However, we didn't have enough space to hang out our mattress cover. Our balcony has little space. Beside that, we only get little sun in our room for four hours or so everyday. It clearly shows that there was no way to dry up the mattress cover in such a short amount of time. How could we dry up the mattress cover?

We used two electric fan, and it worked very well! We hanged the mattress cover on a table inside our home. We rotated position of the fans around the mattress cover every several hours. We dried it up mostly within 24 hours. We were finally able to dry it up in next 12 hours completely! :)

The consume power of the fan is little, so it is worth while to use it for drying.

I'm going to write how to wash the mattress cover next time. :)