BellaOnline Forums Money Frugal Living Cleaning your Microfiber

We use microfiber to clean floors but the microfiber itself is SO hard to clean afterwards. They clump up in the washing machine. Any ideas? The websites talk about not washing them with other clothes, which is fairly obvious to me. These things are grimy. Also, microfiber cloth would latch on to other clothes and rip them up. But even if you wash them on their own, with other microfibers, how do you keep them from turning into a single large microfiber ball and not really getting clean?

Since I have other type of rags, when I wash the microfiber with, say, terrycloth, it prevents the one big ball syndrome.

Another option is to put a few into several mash bags - Dollar Tree has these usually three to a dollar. I use these mesh bags for delicates, but they also help separate things.

Step 1 - we're soaking them overnight in 120F water and Mr. Clean .



I believe most terrycloth is cotton which they say not to wash microfiber with, because the microfibers clog with the cotton that it's ripped from the cotton fabric. You might want to check if your terrycloth is cotton.

Hurrah! Overnight soaking did the trick! I ran my microfibers on sanitize in my HE side-loading washer and look! They separated out quite nicely all around even the top and sides!

How did the soaking keep them from clumping?

Jilly -

That would be a question for physics majors . Any guess I had would be wildly inaccurate. But I'll guess anyway.

My guess is if the microfibers are fully loaded with water when they go in, that make them less "clingy" and less likely to latch onto each others like velcro when the wash process begins. If they're already stuck together at the start then the shorter-period soak in the washing machine isn't enough to de-tether them.