Housework is something we Swedes spend a large part of our waking hours on.
In a household, there are many things that must be donated in order for a home to feel clean and fresh. It must be vacuumed, scrubbed, washed and aired. A watershed that can often arise when it comes to cleaning in particular is how often we Swedes change bed linen.
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TV4’s cleaning expert Marlene Eriksson talked about her thoughts when she recently guested on “Efter fem”. She is zealous but not super zealous.
How often do you change your bed linen? Image source: Jessica Gow / TT
– I wash my bedding once a week. If you have children and pets, you can wash more often. It certainly doesn’t happen that much if you wash less often. Of course it’s bacteria, but it’s your own bacteria. Of course you can eat in bed, but you don’t have to eat among the bedclothes, she said during her visit to Efter fem.
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Her advice for keeping other people’s bacteria away from the machine is to run a completely empty washing machine at 60 degrees if you share a laundry room with others.
How to clean your washing machine in the best way
A few times a year you should clean your washing machine properly. An old housewife’s trick is to mix three to four tablespoons of bicarbonate with four tablespoons of water, which you mix into a paste that you pour into the dosing compartment. At the same time, you pour three to four deciliters of vinegar into the drum. What you do then is to run an empty machine at high heat.
For many, a washing machine is a luxury. But a little work – that’s all it takes. Image source: Martina Holmberg / TT
Then clean the drum and the opening with water. You can also throw a detergent tablet into the drum.
But if we take a shot from cleaning the machine to just washing clothes, there may be other things that can be good to keep an eye on. There is a mistake that many people make when washing their clothes that not everyone is aware of.
“Perfect for bacteria and bad odor”
Many times when you have taken up cleaning and donating, you do many things at the same time. When the dishwasher beeps that it is ready, you may wait an hour to take it out. The same thing when it comes to the clothes in the washing machine.
But here there are things you actually have to think about, says the Dane News24.
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How long do you leave the laundry in the washing machine? Image source: Jessica Gow/TT
Damp clothes left in the washing machine create perfect conditions for bacteria and bad smells, which can be difficult to get rid of. The cleaning expert Mary Futher, known as Madame Sweat on TikTok where she has around a million followers, talks about the maximum limit for how long you can leave clothes in the washing machine.
– If you do laundry in the evening and the machine is ready just before bedtime, you should take the laundry out. 12 hours is the absolute limit of pain… if the clothes stay longer than that, it’s almost like you have to wash everything again, she says.
So now you know!
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