Fresh Sheets Once a Month? Think Again!

How often do you use your linen? By linen, we’re referring to bedsheets, pillow cases, bath and hand towels, et cetera. Modern science tells us any cloth that sees frequent use is fair game for bacteria and other types of soiling to build up. The point is, your sheets are not nearly as clean as you think they are, and we’re going to tell you why, then offer a few quick tips to ensure you and fresh sheets are never far apart.

Depending on how often you bathe (whether that’s three times a day or three times a week), you get pretty frequent mileage out of your towels. Towels pick up loose hair, dead skin, residue from soap, lotions, body oils and sweat. With that delightful cocktail of ingredients slowly building up on a cotton towel, we suggest using a fresh towel every three or four uses. Another variable to consider is dampness in your home or bathroom. Well ventilated homes allow towels, sheets and hanging cloth items in general to stay fresh just a little longer, simply due to the absence of excess moisture in the air. Although, regardless of your home setting, we still recommend four uses (if each use is one shower) as the absolute longest you should be using a towel. While washing depends on your access to laundry facilities and how many extra towels you have at home, if you can manage an extra load of sheets and towels once a week or every other when washing clothes, that’s ideal.

The next, and slightly more risqué topic is bedding. How often you change your bedding could depend on a variety of factors. Whether you sleep nude, if you sweat significantly in your sleep, whether you sleep with a partner, how often you have sex if so, and in the case of multiple partners, whether or not you care if your sheets smell like multiple people. Make no mistake. You sleep in your bed nightly, and just like towels, your bedding picks up natural body oils, soap and lotion residue, sweat, dead skin, hair and in bad cases dust mites and other critters. The smell does build after some time, and for the purposes of cleanliness we recommend changing your sheets once every two weeks at the most. Anything longer than that, and you’re at the risk of picking up old germs and bacteria.

If you get sick, we definitely recommend washing all of your linen (bedding, towels et all), midway through the course of the illness, and again once you’re almost through the recovery stage. Keeping clean sheets can mean the different between a drawn out two-week long battle with a virus, or a quick weekend cold.

As always at Maidstr, we are glad to provide our customers and readers with helpful cleaning tips and advice. We are proud to call ourselves the Greater Toronto and Guelph areas’ on-demand cleaning service, and promise a fully satisfactory clean.