Here we are going to share with you how to get rid of the stink in your bath towels.
Last year we had a problem with our towels. They would come out of the washer smelling fresh and clean, but as soon as we used them they would stink really bad.
We looked on Pinterest, we looked online trying to figure out what to do. We tried the baking soda and vinegar thing and nothing
seemed to help.
Until we found a solution that we are going to be sharing with you here.
It really works! Our towels have been stink-free for one year and we are really excited to share this with you.
What causes your towels to stink is the bacteria that gets trapped inside the fibers of your towel. They just stink really bad.
That wet environment of it hanging there in your bathroom is going to cause the bacteria to grow. It’s that moist environment that’s just gonna really cause problems.
You can solve that problem by making sure that you’re changing your towels often. Maybe even daily, if not more. Bur for many people that is not the real solution. But there is no reason to do that, but more on that later in the article.
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One of the things that causes bacteria to get trapped in your towel is fabric softener. If you use chemical fabric softener, it coats the fibers of your towel making them feel soft.
If you’ve ever used softener, you notice that your washer has a separate dispenser for fabric softener and what that does is it dispenses it during the final rinse, it’s being deposited onto your towels, chemical is going to cause them to feel soft but it’s going to trap bacteria in your towel.
At the end of this article we are gonna address some of the options you have instead of chemical fabric softener.
The other thing that is going to cause your towels to stink and trap the bacteria in there is if you have hard water. The minerals in your hard water are going to be deposited and stick to the fibers in your towel, trapping the bacteria in there.
Here is how to get rid of the stink.
First of, you’re going to start off with clean towels and don’t do more than 1 loads worth. If you have a bunch of towels to do, just do 1 loads worth at a time. You don’t want to overstep your washer.
There’s a couple of ways that you can do the stripping solution.
You can buy packets of RLR laundry treatment. We’ve seen it on Amazon, it’s about $3 a packet and you’re going to need three packets. So if you’ve got a lot of towels to do, that can be expensive or you can do a DIY version, which is what we are going to do.
All these ingredients cab be bought for less than $15 and we’ve done probably about eight stripping solutions from it. So if you’ve got a lot to do, this is going to be worth it to do.
You can find all these ingredients at your local store: 20 Mule Team Borax , washing soda, make sure it’s washing soda, not baking soda and also you will need Calgon water softener. This is different than the Calgon bath salts that you find in the bath section. You can find all these in the laundry section.
And then also we have a half a cup of strong detergent, just to help boost this and the one we are using is Tide.
If you have a top loader where you can do a soak without the water draining, that’s going to be ideal, but we have a front loader so we can’t do that.
We are going to be using our bathtub and what we are going to do is we are going to fill it halfway with hot water. We are going to add three tablespoons of each of the ingredients mentioned above, along with our half a cup of detergent.
Then we are going to add our towels and let this sit until the water completely cools off, at least for four hours, even six to eight hours.
About every half an hour to an hour you’re gonna want to come and just agitate them them and kind of massage them a little bit to make sure the water really gets in there thoroughly so it can release all that minerals and all that bacteria in there.
If some of the towels are popping up above the water, you want them to be completely submerged. If you want you can put something heavy on top.
Once the water has completely cooled, what we are going to do is we are going to squeeze out the towels and put them in a laundry basket.
Next we are going to wash these on a normal wash cycle with no soap, no softener, nothing, just to get all the stripping solution and all the nastiness off.
Let’s talk about some of the ways to prevent stink from happening in the first place.
We mentioned that it’s caused by hard water, so obviously if you have a whole house water softener that would be ideal, but if you don’t, you can use the liquid Colgone, the same that we use in our stripping solution. The instructions say to add one whole capful along with your laundry detergent and what this will do it will act as a water softener as your clothes are washing just to break down those minerals so they don’t stick to your towels.
To keep your towels feeling soft without using a chemical fabric softener, you want to stick to a plant-based fabric softener and that is not going to allow the bacteria to get trapped.
Our absolute favorite is mrs. Myers. It’s a little bit on the pricey side but Target has good sales every once in a while. Seventh Generation also has a great plant-based. You’re going to want to stick to plant-based ones as opposed to the chemical ones.
Some people do use vinegar as a softener and we do use that sometimes, but we do have a caution. It can be very harsh on your washer. You want to use caution if you always use vinegar. We don’t like to use it all the time for that reason, but you can definitely use it because it does work as a softener.
This method of stripping for minerals is not only good for towels but it’s also great for all of your laundry. We know people who used homemade laundry soap, which really isn’t a very good idea, because soap and dirt still stick to your clothing. They have done stripping on these and have really amazing results, getting all of that build-up out of their clothes. So feel free to do this on not just your towels but any other laundry that you’re having issues with.
We hope you enjoyed this article on how to get rid of the stink in your towels. We know it worked for us and we hope that you’ll give it a try if you’re struggling with stinky towels.
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