How Do You Wash Your FR Clothes?

FR Maintenance: Washing your FR

All right, you ready? Here’s the simplest thing. Wash your flame-resistant clothing. Can I say wash your dirty clothes? Okay, so don’t be afraid to wash them. Don’t let them get crazy dirty. Just wash your clothes.

Use soap. Use warm water. Use hot water. All of the cleaning. You know the expression, let the tool do the work for you. I tell you, agitation, a decent detergent, some time, and your clothes come out clean. Right, and that hot water does not affect your clothes. Your clothes aren’t going to shrink in hot water. Your clothes shrink when you have an overly hot dryer and you over dry your clothing. Don’t do that. Just respect the FR clothing in the dryer. Simple.

We can go into some other things, like don’t use bleach. We don’t have any FR clothing that’s white, so I don’t know why anybody would use a real bleach like sodium hypochlorite. You’re not supposed to use OxiClean. OxiClean is essentially hydrogen peroxide. These contain OxiClean type of products. Sometimes it’s called bleach alternative. Sometimes it’s called Oxi something. They’re small oxidizers. You’d really have to wash your clothes for a very long time to do some damage with them, but they will damage high viz very quickly. They will take out that high viz yellow or orange dye pretty quickly.

Washing FR clothing is very easy. There’s no big mystery behind it. Just wash it often, use hot water, heat is your friend, use a cooler dryer, and a good detergent. That’s it. Simple.

I’m going to say a couple of other things. You’ve got those commercial laundering guys, the ones that come around in vans. They’ll stretch the truth about special washing. No, it’s not special. It’s very simple. You wash your FR clothing the same way you would wash a pair of jeans.

The other thing I’ll say is there are people out there buying the cheapest detergent they can find and then complaining about their laundry. Look, I am not a Procter and Gamble spokesperson, but buy a decent detergent. There are more enzymes, more surfactants, more cleaning power. A lot of cheaper options are just more water and less of the good stuff.

Maybe you can say that flame-resistant clothing and laundry detergents are similar in that, for the most part, you get what you pay for.