Baking Soda Baking soda has been a trusty household staple for decades—and for good reason. Not only does baking soda regulate the PH levels of water, it also brightens and deodorizes, making it the perfect cleaning agent for clothing, bedding and towels.
If you don't use a scented detergent, a lightly perfumed fabric softener will help keep your sheets lightly fragranced. You can also try using fabric sprays to freshen your sheets in-between washes – perfect for a midweek freshen-up of your bedding.
Use a lavender and water spray to refresh your bedding and help with a good night's sleep. Simply combine 60ml distilled water and 10-15 drops of your favourite essential oil in an empty spray bottle.
Soak in Vinegar
The acidic properties of white vinegar can help cut through and eliminate the bacteria and residues that are causing odor in your sheets. Fill a bucket, tub or other large container with 1 part white vinegar and 5 parts hot water. Let your sheets and pillowcases soak for at least a couple of hours.
Keeping sheets smelling fresh
Sheets get stale, generally due to lack of air circulation in the linen closet (or drawer or shelf or wherever you store them) – they need to breathe! And if there's a speck of moisture with them, the problem is even worse.
A bedroom can smell in the morning as a result of body odour, dust, moisture in the room, dirty bedding and a messy room. Poor air circulation at night makes unpleasant odours linger until morning. These smells can be avoided by regularly cleaning the bedroom and making sure to air it out every day.
Hotels use special cleaners and large capacity washers and dryers to make their sheets and towels extra clean. They also have detergents not available commercially. And we can't forget they iron sheets with an industrial iron. All those factor in to what makes your sheets and towels smell so good!
We'll cut straight to the chase: You should be changing your bed sheets once a week. "The longest you should wait before changing out your sheets is two weeks," says Carolyn Forté, executive director of the Good Housekeeping Institute Home Care & Cleaning Lab "Weekly is even better."
Thankfully, steaming is relatively easy. Just drape your sheets over a clothes line or shower rod and fill your steamer with water. Once it's ready, position the steamer head on the sheets, moving it around the surface of the fabric. Before you make your bed, make sure the sheets are totally dry.
Wash the sheets on a gentle cycle using cool or lukewarm water. Washing sheets in hot water is usually unnecessary unless you need to sanitize the sheets due to allergies or after an illness. Remove the sheets as soon as the cycle is over to reduce wrinkles.
I like to give sheets and towels a refresh each season. Add sheets and towels to the washing machine. Add ½ cup baking soda into the detergent dispenser and ½ cup vinegar to the fabric softener dispenser. Then wash on the hottest setting possible and dry as usual.
How Often You Should Wash Your Sheets (And How to Get Them Really Clean) Experts recommend washing or changing sheets once a week.
Adding ½ cup of baking soda in your laundry is a great way to maintain your towels, linens, and sheets.
When it comes to not washing your sheets, there are a few things that can happen. First, you may start to notice a musty smell coming from your bed. This is because the sweat and oils from your body are building up on the sheets and not being washed away.
Health Hazards When You Don't Wash Your Sheets Regularly
Dust mites. Fungi. Bacteria. Mold.
Here's what we found: About 46% of the people we surveyed wash their bed sheets as often or more often than they're supposed to — a surprisingly large chunk of people. Bravo, SurveyMonkey pollsters. But still, the slight majority, 54%, do not wash their sheets often enough — only a few times per month or less.
Reed diffusers are great for keeping your home fragrant while you're away. They disperse scents naturally and do not require heat or electricity. Get a few in the same scent and place them in various rooms to fill your entire place with a luxurious fragrance.
It's all thanks to a clever gizmo known as an HVAC scent diffuser. These are ultra-quiet attachments to heating/air conditioning systems that use high amounts of air pressure to deliver nanoparticles of scented oils uniformly around a room, area, or building.
Damp, mould and mildew are the most common causes of a musty or stale smell in houses, creating this smell by emitting gases known as microbial volatile organic compounds (MVOCs) as they grow.
People cannot rely on their sense of smell to awaken them to the danger of fire, according to a new Brown University study. Study participants easily detected odors when awake and in the early transition into sleep (Stage One sleep) but, once asleep, did not.
Cotton is hygroscopic; this is a fancy word that means it can absorb water from the air. So even though your sheets are perfectly dry when they are placed on the shelf, they absorb the humidity in the air providing an excellent environment for bacteria and mildew. The organisms' waste is the source of the musty smell.