You may have seen at-home dry cleaning kits on your recent trip to the store or read about them online. While caring for dry clean only items from the comfort of your home may sound appealing, there are some things to consider before DIY dry cleaning your clothes requiring special care. After considering the risks and necessary time to DIY your dry cleaning, you'll probably realize that using a dry cleaner that offers pickup and delivery service is a better deal.
What is an At-Home Dry Cleaning Kit?
There are several options for purchasing a dry cleaning kit meant to be used with your home dryer. Most of these kits feature a pre-treatment for spot-treating any stains, a pre-soaked cleaning solution pad, and a protection bag. The first step is spot treating the items. Then the user dampens the accompanying pad/cleaning cloth, places the item and pad into the bag that came with the kit to protect the garment, and places the bag in the dryer to, essentially, steam clean the clothes.
What are the Risks of Using Dry Cleaning Kits?
While the at-home dry cleaning kits claim to work for dry clean only items, these items require special and gentle care that dry cleaning kits do not always provide. Dry cleaning garments on your own can lead to irreversible fabric damage, leading to the tossing of your favorite clothes. We've listed a few of the top risks of dry cleaning at home rather than taking it to the professionals.
Shrinking Fabric
While professional dry cleaners take special care to keep your clothing in tip-top shape, you do not always get the same care when using at-home dry cleaning kits. Some reviewers who tried at-home dry cleaning kits mentioned that their garments shrunk after using the kits on their items.
Odors May Remain on Your Garments
Once you take the time to dry clean your items at home, you don't expect to have unpleasant odors, such as body odor, left on your freshly cleaned shirts. Unfortunately, DIY dry cleaning kits do not always remove body odor on your garments and only help freshen your clothes.
On the other hand, your local dry cleaner will ensure all odors are removed from your items before you receive them back.
Leaving Strong Smells on Fabrics that can Trigger Headaches
As we mentioned, at-home dry cleaning kits do help freshen clothes. However, it can come with overpowering scents left behind that can trigger headaches or migraines for some. Even those that strong fragrances do not negatively affect, the pungent smell from at-home dry cleaning kits is not pleasant to deal with all day while wearing the clothes.
Creating or Setting Stains
You can trust the stain removal experts at Craig's Dry Cleaners to remove stains from your favorite garments safely. However, dry cleaning kits are not always successful in removing hard-to-treat stains, or even worse, they can create stains on unstained items. If stains are not treated properly before the dry cleaning process, it can cause the stains to set permanently into the fabric, which can ruin garments. Some at-home dry cleaning kit users have even reported stains appearing on their clothes after using the kit.
Embellishment Damage
When using DIY dry cleaning methods, you must consider any embellishments on your garments to ensure your items do not become damaged. If an embellishment falls off in the process, it can cause additional damage to your delicate clothing and cost you even more to get repaired.
Dealing with embellished garments daily, professional dry cleaners will treat your items with the special care required to avoid embellishment damage.
If you've thought about trying at-home solutions to keep your dry clean only garments due to the lack of time for making a trip to the dry cleaners, there's a better solution. Craig's Dry Cleaners offers free pickup and delivery throughout the Tri-Cities TN region for your dry cleaning. We will pick up your dry cleaned items at your doorstep and delivery them back fresh and clean. You'll never have to worry about the risks of DIY dry cleaning and let the professionals handle the task for you. Contact us to learn more about our dry cleaning services and free pickup and delivery in Bristol, Kingsport, Johnson City, Abingdon, and surrounding areas.
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