Cyberspace is brimming with home remedies for ridding your mattress of everything from bed bugs to dust mites to blood and urine stains. Spray it with vinegar. Douse it with rubbing alcohol. Spritz it with lemon juice. Bombard it with steam.
But when it comes to mattresses, prevention is better than any DIY cure. And that’s because moisture and mattresses go together about as well as high-heels and inflatable life rafts.
AN EXERCISE IN FUTILITY
Trying to clean a mattress is an exhausting, back-breaking, time-consuming, and largely futile endeavour. Add in steam-cleaning, and it can be a costly one too.
Whatever you spill or spray onto a mattress, whether accidentally or intentionally, can never be completely removed. Home solutions might get that yellow sweat stain or puddle of smelly wee out of the covering fabric, but they can do little to remove it from deep down.
Scrubbing and blotting with cleaning solutions merely drives whatever substance you’re trying to get rid of deeper into the mattress layers, where it could encourage mould and bacteria growth, as well as cause long-term odour.
And once wet, a mattress must be thoroughly dried, since damp layers become breeding grounds for mould, bacteria and allergy-causing dust mites.
THE PROBLEM WITH BUGS
It’s a similar story when it comes to ridding your bed of dust mites or bed bugs.
Yes, steam will kill these critters on contact, but most bed bugs aren’t hanging around on the outside of your mattress just waiting to be blitzed. A bed bug infestation lives deep inside a mattress, where no steam or home remedy is going to penetrate.
The same goes for dust mites. Home remedies might kill dust mites living in the mattress’s surface fabric, but millions more live within the internal foam layers. Dust mites also thrive in damp places, so adding liquid or steam to the mattress is entirely counter-productive.
THE CONVENIENT, EFFECTIVE APPROACH
Instead of relying on ineffective home remedies, rely on a mattress protector to prevent the problem in the first place.
Protect-A-Bed’s mattress protectors have a hypoallergenic layer of Miracle Membrane® that makes them 100% impervious to all liquids, as well as to dust mites. Slip one over your mattress and now, dust mites can’t reach the sleeper, and anything spilled or leaked onto the bed will be absorbed by the mattress protector’s sleep surface fabric.
Then it’s as simple as throwing the protector in the wash with the rest of your linen, before drying on the line or in a tumble-dryer on a medium heat…a good deal easier than dragging a wet mattress out into the sun to dry!
For bed bugs, Protect-A-Bed’s BugLock®Plus, also with Miracle Membrane®, completely encases the mattress, so bed bugs can’t enter the mattress to breed, and those already inside the mattress can’t escape to feed.
So stop scrubbing and steaming and spraying, and let a Protect-A-Bed mattress protector or encasement do all the work for you. It’s the only convenient, effective way to keep a mattress as clean, fresh-smelling and bug-free as it was when you first invested in it.
