Spring has Sprung! The temperatures are rising along with the inseams and that means it's time to inspect, clean, and store your winter items! My name is Megan and in this article, I will give you a step by step guide along with some product recommendations.
Step 1: Gather Your Winter Items
This can include your down jackets, heavy-weight fleeces, wool items, and cold weather sleeping bags.
Step 2: Inspect Your Items for Damage
You’ll want to look for rips, tears, burn holes, stains, smells, and dirt. It's important to inspect the seams pretty closely, and any high traffic areas like the neck and wrist cuffs. You’ll want to find them before you wash your items because a small problem can be made a much bigger problem in a wash cycle.
If you find small to medium rips, tears or burn holes in your down jackets or sleeping bags; you can fix this pretty easily with something like Gear Aid Tenacious Tape. If you want get a little fancier with colors and designs, you can use NoSo Patches. Both of these items are available at Second Gear!
If you’ve found a bigger hole or rip that is too big for you to patch, check your warranty information. Some outdoor brands, like Patagonia, have absolutely rock-solid damage warranties. You can drop items off at the Patagonia store or mail them in, and they will be repaired or you will be offered store credit. This is usually with no to minimal questions asked. You probably paid a pretty penny for this stuff, unless you bought it at Second Gear because you’re a smart cookie. So, use the the included coverages that comes with your items! If you are unlucky and your product doesn’t have a damage warranty, call around for some local seamstresses. You can usually get stuff patched for a fraction of what replacing an item would cost and reduce your carbon footprint at the same time.
If you’ve found holes in your fleece or wool, gear tape doesn’t work quite as well, but a a little thread and needle can usually patch that right up. You can also add your own embroidered patches or fabric swatches to fix them up. If you’re not comfortable with a needle and thread, find a local seamstress. Stuff like that is usually less than $15-$20 to fix depending on the size of the damage.
Step 3: Treat Your Stains and Smells
Now that we have repaired all our physical damage, it's time to pretreat those stains. You can use almost any color-safe washing pretreatment. I honestly use Shout. It's cheap and it works really well. Give those spots and stains a good spritz, and then work the spray into the material. I don’t like using a brush as they can cause pilling. So, I usually just put on some gloves and gently rub the material in a circular motion.
If you’ve got a nice ripe funk on your items; you can pretreat that as well. You’ll want to make a batch of something like OxiClean or Nikwax Base Wash in a container using hot water to dissolve the powder, and then waiting for it to cool before adding your items. Once the water is tepid, you will submerge your stinky items and give them a good stir for 15-20 mins
The next step is waiting. I like to let the stain remover sit for at least an hour before I actually wash those items. You can leave your stinky items in the water for an hour or more depending on how much smell you're trying to remove.
Step 4: Washing
You’ll need a front load washer or an agitator-less top load washer. The old-school agitator style washer will absolutely chew your items up and cause damage. You can use the laundromat if you don’t have access to a front load washer at home.
Now its time to put those items in the wash. It’s usually best to only do 2-3 smaller items at a time, or a single sleeping bag. Do not overstuff your washer because it WILL damage your items. Best practice is to zip up all the zippers and turn your items inside out. It will keep the items from damaging each other with those sharp plastic bits.
Your items will have a tag telling you the temperatures that are safe for washing and drying. However, best practice is a cold water, minimal agitation delicate cycle.
The best soap to use will depend on your items. Nikwax makes a whole range of technical soaps for outdoor items and you can get the a lot of them at Second Gear. You’ll use Nikwax Down Wash and Down Proof for your down jackets and sleeping bags. Nikwax Wool Wash for your wool items and Base Wash works really well for fleeces. Follow the instructions of the soap you use. Its usually about half the bottle for 3-4 items when you’re using Nikwax products.
Step 5: Drying and Storing
Congrats! Your items should be well on the way to clean, but they’re still wet! For your down items, you’ll want to chuck them in the dryer on the lowest temperature setting you have. This will usually be something like Air Fluff or Low. You will also want to chuck in a whole sleeve of tennis balls or wool dryer balls. This helps break up all the wet down as it drys and gives it back its original loft. If you don’t do this you’ll probably get clumpy down which will ruin the thermal insulation of the jacket or bag. It's kind of the same for air drying with down. Its going to get clumpy unless you want to manually break it apart constantly for the next 6 hours.
For your fleeces, you can usually dry on minimal heat or hang to dry outside if you like. Wool items can go in the dryer on the lowest heat setting. You can lay them out to dry, but don’t hang them because they will stretch out.
Now as we’re using the lowest heat setting, its probably going to take more than one dryer cycle to completely dry these items. Sleeping bags could take several hours to completely dry and you want to make sure everything is fully dry so you don’t get mold.
Now that all your items are clean, dry and hopefully smelling fresh its time to store them! If you have enough closet space, it's fine to just hang them up and ignore them until fall. If you don’t have the closet space, you can store the items in totes. If your going to put the items in storage containers, they need to be 100% dry otherwise you will get mold. It's best not to compress your down long-term because it can damage the lofting effect. Just make sure your totes are stored in a dry place, and that the seal is good so you don’t get spiders or other friends that might find your jackets and sleeping bags as a cozy place to chill. That's all for now! Thank you for coming to my Wash and Clean TED Talk.