Your Laundry Cleaning Chemical Guide

Are you looking for the right cleaner for your laundry room? AppliancePartsPros.com is here to help! We’ll cover common cleaning chemicals and their usage, as well as provide useful safety tips. Join us today to ensure you tackle each job with the right cleaner!

Is it safe to combine cleaning chemicals?

While chlorine bleach can safely be added to a wash cycle for laundry with detergent, when it comes to actually cleaning your appliances, you shouldn’t combine cleaners. Specialized cleaners should be able to get the job done without adding more chemicals to the mix. Combining chemicals is dangerous, and you could seriously damage your possessions or hurt yourself or your family if you mix the wrong ingredients.

Here’s a list of common cleaning chemicals you should never combine:

• Bleach and ammonia are two common ingredients of many household cleaners. Combined, they release chloramine gas, which can burn your lungs and throat if inhaled.

• Bleach and vinegar will also create chloramine and chlorine gas when combined, irritating or burning skin, eyes, throat, and lungs.

• Bleach and rubbing alcohol create trichloromethane, which will, at best, leave you dizzy and nauseous. In high volumes, it can cause fatal damage to your internal organs.

• Hydrogen peroxide and vinegar when mixed create a corrosive acid that can cause serious damage to you and your possessions.

If you are using multiple cleaning products to clean your washer or dryer drum, make sure to completely rinse out and wipe the inside before changing products!

Do I really need to clean my washer?

Yes! You might think that the thing that gets your clothes clean should be clean, itself, but this isn’t always the case. Your washer won’t always successfully rinse out the dirt, grime, and leftover detergent it cleans from your clothes. This dirty water can get caught in the appliance’s nooks and crannies, leading to foul-smelling bacterial or mildew blooms.

Unaddressed, these issues can impart foul smells and even stains on freshly cleaned clothes or eventually cause your washer’s internal parts to degrade. Most manufacturers will include cleaning recommendations in the use and care manual. Keeping up with cleaning should be a regular part of your appliance maintenance routine!

Want some washer cleaning tips? Check out our appliance cleaning guide, or try out a product purpose-built to clean your washer, like Affresh washer cleaning tabs.

Liquid vs Powder vs Pod: Which Detergent Is Best?

While we think that liquid and powder detergents have a clear advantage over pod-based detergents, when trying to pick between the two, it comes down to personal preference, but we can talk a bit about the pros and cons of each to help you decide.

• Liquid detergent is the current classic option with the widest variety of brands and scent options. It dissolves readily in cold water – something that powder detergent struggles to do – and can easily be used to pretreat stains.

• Dry or powdered detergent is overall the most cost effective option, because it can be bought in bulk, is usually cheaper in general, keeps for a long time, and you use less of it when you wash clothes. Its packaging – usually recyclable – is also the most environmentally friendly.

• Pod-based detergents are highly convenient in the right contexts. They’re pre-measured, but for a certain laundry load size. If you’re washing a heavy load or a very light one, a single pod may not be appropriate. They also produce much more plastic waste pollution and are typically a great deal more expensive than other options.

Six Safe Cleaning Suggestions for Your Laundry Room

Want to make cleaning as quick and painless as possible? Here are some specific tips for getting your laundry room (or just your laundry) clean fast.

1. For a basic cleaning, start with a gentle cleaner

Whether you’re tackling the washer and dryer or trying to scrub stains out of a plastic or fiberglass utility sink, start with a gentle cleaner.

• For a washing machine, that means using vinegar or a washer cleaning tablet on an empty wash cycle. Check out our guide to cleaning a smelly washer to see what we mean!
• For your dryer, use a bit of dish detergent and water on a sponge to clean out the drum. Rinse the interior thoroughly with a new sponge and clean water, then dry the interior either with a microfiber cloth or by running a load of towels through the dryer. Never use flammable cleaners in your dryer.
• For a utility sink, stick with non-abrasive or lightly abrasive all purpose cleaners that are appropriate for plastic or fiberglass.

2. To defeat stubborn foul smells or mildew in your washing machine…

If you’ve tried washer cleaning tablets and vinegar, it may be time to move on to the heavy duty stuff. Just make sure your washer is completely clear of other cleaning products before you step it up. Remember, no combining bleach with other cleaners!

Run a half cup of bleach through a normal wash on the hottest setting, then throw in an extra rinse cycle to make sure all the bleach is cleared out. This should help to eliminate any lingering smells, just be sure to also wipe out the detergent drawer and door gasket once the wash is done. Water can get trapped in those places and cause bacteria and mildew to bloom again.

3. Be careful about the cleaners you use in your dryer

Never use flammable cleaning products in your dryer. That’s fuel, and combined with dryer heat and lint for kindling, it makes for a serious fire hazard.

4. Dealing with serious stains in a dryer

If you’ve got discolorations from leached clothing dye or stains from an exploded pen in a dryer drum, you may be able to get rid of them with some diluted bleach and an old towel.

• Dilute bleach in water. For exact amounts, refer to the label on your bleach bottle. Typically, ⅓ cup of bleach per 1 gallon of water is sufficient.
• Soak a towel or two in your bleach and water solution, then ring them out so they aren’t sopping wet and toss them in the dryer.
• Run the dryer on air tumble for 20 – 30 minutes. This should help remove stains and will additionally disinfect the drum.

• Wipe down the drum interior afterward to prevent bleach stains on your next load of clothes in the dryer. 

5. Crayons, gum, or candy melted to the walls of the dryer drum?

You’ll need an abrasive cleaner to lift up that baked-on gunk. A paste made of either dry detergent and water or baking soda and water can do the trick. Apply it with a sponge or cloth directly on the melted goop and scrub to lift it away.

If you have extra dryer sheets, those may do the trick, too. Scrape up as much of the gunk as you can, then wet one or two dryer sheets and lay them over the offending crud. Let it sit for fifteen minutes. This should loosen up stuck on sugar or wax, making it much easier to clear away.

6. Ammonia is an incredibly effective stain remover, but use it with caution

Ammonia diluted in water is incredibly effective at removing grease, sweat stains, and more from clothes, but you should take care when using it. Wear gloves when working with ammonia and never ever combine it with bleach, or you could wind up seriously or even fatally injuring yourself.

Wrapping Up

We hope our tips have helped you to get the most out of cleaning up in your laundry room. Just remember to take proper safety precautions, never mix chemical cleaners, and follow label instructions, and you’ll be golden!

If you have more questions not answered by this guide, why not head over to our blog? We’ve got tons of safety tips and cleaning tutorials to help you spruce up any room in your home. Whether you’re just trying to keep your appliances clean or need assistance fixing a broken part, AppliancePartsPros.com is here to help!